Worlds of IF (July 1960)

SCIENCE FICTION

JULY 1960 • 35 CENTS

IN A BODY

by J. T. Me Intosh

You can paint
an original picture
like this, using real
artists' oil paints •••
the

(overlay) way

JUST AS A TEACHER by
your side, this entirely new
and original method shows
you in actual size and color
how and what to do. You
compare your progress,
step-by-step, with the easy-
to-follow V1S-A-LENS, and
before you realize it, you
are actually painting.

A choice of subjects avail-
able— get yours now —

Price includes Vis-A- ontv
Lens, 12x16 inch Art - JL
Board, 6 tubes Oil if. 7 5
Paint, Oil, Turpentine, im
2 Brushes, 16 page In- ■
struction Book.

VIS-A-LENS is sold by Aldens,
Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roe-
buck & Co. and leading depart-
ment stores, coast to coast. H
your local stores do not have it,
ask them to order an assortment.

Address inquiries to:

Vis-a-lens, Inc., 530 E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna.

(jottr

(mmtJwl

yowcfrifo!

Only one power controls your
destiny— a strange force sleeping
in your mind. Awaken it ! Com-
mand it to obey you! Push
obstacles aside and attain your
fondest hopes and ideals. Let
the Rosicrucians show you how
this can be done.

Learn why many of history's
great masters were Rosicrucians
such as Leonardo de Vinci, Ben-
jamin Franklin, Isaac Newton,
Sir Francis Bacon, etc. Each of
these men learned how to con-
trol their fate, to develop mind
power, to attain success and
happiness. The knowledge that
helped these men of history is
now helping thousands of think-
ing men and women throughout
the world climb to new heights
they, at one time, thought im-
possible. And they are no dif-
ferent than you !

SEND FOR FREE BOOK

Why not discover for yourself how
you can take advantage of this price-
less knowledge The Rosicrucians
have preserved through the ages.
If you are sincere in wanting greater
success, security and happiness send
TODAY for the fascinating FREE
book, "The Mastery of Life.” There
is no obligation and it may mean
the turning point in your life, to-
ward achievements you’ve never be-
lieved possible. Why not do it
NOW? Just address your request to:
Scribe S.Q.L.

The ROSICRUCIANS (amorc)

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA
(NOT a religious organization)

WORLDS OF

SCIENCE FICTION

JULY 1960

All Stories New and Complete
Editor : H. L. GOLD

Feature Editor : FREDERIK POHL

NOVELETTES

IN A BODY by J. T. McIntosh

THE LAST TRESPASSER by Jim Harmon

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE by Hayden Howard

SHORT STORIES

TALENT by Robert Bloch
TIME PAYMENT by Sylvia Jacobs

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC by Frederik Pohl
THE NON-ELECTRONIC BUG by E. Mittleman

FEATURE

WORLDS OF IF by Frederik Pohl

COVER by John Pederson, Jr.t “Tourists In Space"

lUlliHlllin^

5

66

114

38

52

85

106

99

IF la published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation. Vol. 10, No. S. Main Office J
421 Hudson Street, New York 14, New York. 354 per copy. Subscriptions 12 issues $3.00
in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions,
elsewhere $4.00. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, New York.
Copyright New York 1960 by Digest Productions Corporation. All rights including trans-
lations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed, stamped
envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories
printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual
persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc. New York,

Next Issue I September I on Sale July 1st

Illustrated by RITTER

The odds against being found out were 21^ billion to
one — and Vee was camouflaged to the very last hair!

IT’S not so that two things crumpled, disorganized mess
can’t occupy the same space coasting on aimlessly through
at the same time. Certainly space, and for the 192 passen-
they can. gers, with a single exception,

Of course, it doesn’t do to become quite dead,
either of them any good. Like all such disasters, it

It took only seven seconds shouldn’t have happened. It
for the huge, powerful, beau- was supposed to be impossible,
tiful spaceship to become a But safety devices have al-

5

ways had one peculiarity.
They function perfectly on
test; and when it isn’t a test,
but the real thing, they often
don’t function at all.

In this case, despite all the
safety devices, the Vigintan
ship inserted herself into
normal space in the middle
of a vast cloud of nebulous
matter.

There were seven seconds
of hell.

Afterward, what was left
of the ship careered on, life
casually deleted from it, lines
twisted to grotesque deform-
ity, all power and purpose in
the giant engines blasted to
absurdity.

A few of the passengers
had had two or three seconds
knowledge of disaster. Half
a dozen had seven seconds of
terror and helplessness and
agony.

Only one had five seconds
grace and was able to make
use of it.

Vee was in the long outer
passage on her way to the
control room when it happen-
ed.

She was actually passing
the open port of one of the
lifeboat shells. At the first
screaming, tearing intima-
tions of mortal agony in the
ship, she dived into the shell
and pulled the emergency
black handle. The tiny life-
boat slid shut with two
seconds to spare, cast itself
loose and scuttled away des-
perately from the parent ship.

WITHIN a few minutes
Vee knew from the blank
silence of the radio that she
was the sole survivor. Am was
dead.

Her grief twisted her in
knots. To a member of Vee’s
race, the death of a husband
or wife was like . . . no, hu-
mans could never understand
it.

Suppose a woman, watch-
ing, saw her husband, her
three children and her mother
and father die. Suppose in the
same catastrophe all her
friends, everybody who spoke
her language, her native coun-
try and everything in it were
obliterated.

That woman might feel as
Vee felt at the death of Am.

But Vee had to go on liv-
ing, if she could. She had
much the same instinct of
self-preservation as humans
had, although Vee was not
human. The fact that she
didn’t want to live was ir-
relevant.

She tried, unsuccessfully to
face the near certainty that
whether she survived a hun-
dred seconds or a hundred
years more, she would never
see any of her own kind
again.

Over the vast distances of
the Galaxy, radio was less
useful, less reliable, than a
bottle thrown in the sea on the
wrong world. When a ship
was wrecked, there wasn’t a
chance of a survivor ever be-
ing found. Hyperspace travel

6

j. t. McIntosh

was the only way to cross
vast distances in a small frac-
tion of a lifetime, and hyper-
space travel was, by definition,
a shorter distance between
two points than a straight
line.

At least you could search
along a straight line. You
couldn’t search along a hyper-
space route.

The one faint chance Vee
had of ever seeing her home
world again — negligible, but
far greater than the chance
of being picked up by a res-
cue ship — was finding some
world where the inhabitants
were approaching the starship
stage of development.

Automatically the tiny life-
boat, so small that she could
hardly change her position in
it, was homing on the nearest
world on which she might
conceivably live. There was
never any guarantee that
there would be one within
the light-year which was the
boat’s extreme limit; in fact,
it was most unlikely.

However, Vee’s lifeboat was
already moving purposefully.
The scanners had found some-
thing.

Without further delay, Vee
threw the switch which would
keep her in suspended anima-
tion until the boat reached
its destination. There was
nothing for her to do. The
boat’s electronic eyes had
found a world on which it
might be possible for her to
survive. All she could do was

go there and find out whether
it was possible or not — by
living or dying.

“T WANT to know the truth,
1 Bill,” said Walt.

Dr. McEwan ran a hand
through his five remaining
hairs. “I wonder why people
always want to know the
worst, and won’t be satisfied
till they get it. I’ve told you
there’s nothing to worry
about. You won’t believe me.
Obviously you’re not going to
believe anything except — ”
“Bill, you ought to know me
by this time,” said Walt.
“The one thing I can’t take
is uncertainty.”

“There’s no uncertainty !
Sure, you may be smashed to
pieces by a truck as you leave
this office, but apart from that
there’s no particular reason
why you shouldn’t live an-
other fifty years or so.”

“Bill, I’ve played poker
with you. You always lose be-
cause you can’t bluff. Listen.
I know it’s right to conceal
things from some people.
Even if they beg you to tell
them the truth, all they really
want is reassurance. I’m dif-
ferent. I want to plan my life
knowing I’m going to have
it for a while, or knowing the
other thing. Remember, Bill,
it’s me, Walt Rinker, you’re
talking to. Not somebody you
know nothing about. I’m ask-
ing you as a friend. I want
you to tell me as a friend.”
“All right,” said Dr. Mc-

7

IN A BODY

Ewan after a pause. “It’s
leukemia. You’re going to
die.”

Walt nodded quite calmly.
“I knew it. How long have I
got?”

“A year maybe.”

Walt took a deep breath.
“Well, that’s a long time.
Couple of hundred people in
town are going to die before
me. I’m pretty high on the
list, but nowhere near the top.
There’s no chance. Bill? No
treatment?”

“There’s X-ray treatment
that sometimes helps. But you
asked me as a friend, Bill —
if it were me, I wouldn’t
spend all my money and the
rest of my time hanging
around hospitals and dying
anyway.”

“Me neither. How long have
I got more or less as I am
now?”

The truth was too brutal.
The blood count and the num-
ber of immature white cells
present showed that the
disease was already acute. In
other words, although Walt
was thin and in anything but
glowing health now, he would
never again be in as good
shape as he was at present.

“Six months, perhaps,” Mc-
Ewan said.

There was silence for a
moment. Then Walt said:
“Thanks for telling me, Bill.”

JANET looked particularly
desirable that night, her
light tan wonderfully set off

by her white dress. She was
a small, slim, one-hundred-
per-cent-feminine brunette.
No tomboy or tough, athletic,
wise-cracking sex-bomb, Jan-
et. She was eleven years
younger than Walt and be-
lieved that a man ought to
be master in his home.

She was so desirable that
Walt resolved never to see her
again.

Sure, she loved him. Sure,
they could have been happy.
Sure, she wasn’t going to like
what he was going to say.

But a broken romance at
nineteen wasn’t the end of
the world, even though it
would seem so at the time.
It certainly wasn’t as bad as
being widowed at twenty, af-
ter spending six months
watching the man you loved
die.

“Honey,” he said, “hang on-
to something. I’m going to
kick you in the guts.”

Her bright smile faded and
tears filled her eyes. “So you
know,” she said.

“Mean you know, too?
How?”

“Never mind. Did Dr. Mc-
Ewan tell you?”

“I made him.”

“He shouldn’t have told
you.”

“By God, he should!” said
Walt with sudden force. “This
was the kind of thing I was
afraid of, the kind of thing
I was trying to avoid.”

“What kind of thing?”
“Everybody knowing all

8

j. t. McIntosh

about it but me. People I
don’t like suddenly being nice
to me. Me making plans and
people humoring me, know-
ing I wasn’t going to be
around to follow through.
Everybody thinking : ‘I’m not
going to be the one to tell
him.’ ”

“Walt, what good does it
do, your knowing that — ”

He interrupted her impati-
ently. “That wasn’t all, Janet.
It doesn’t matter any more,
now that I know. What I was
going to say was — I don’t
think we’d better see each
other again after tonight.”

She was hurt, frightened.
She seemed to shrink. “That’s
certainly a dirty one,” she
whispered. “I wanted ... I
hoped ... I thought we’d get
married and have a little
while — ”

He shook his head decisive-
ly. “I can’t do it, Janet. I
want us to break here and
now. It’ll hurt you if we never
see each other again after to-
night, but it would hurt a
hell of a lot more if we got
married and I died just about
the time our first kid would
be born.”

“Walt, you haven’t had time
to think about this. Can’t you
see, this is all the more reason
for us to get married right
away? Women get married in
wartime, have a forty-eight-
hour honeymoon, and often
never see their husbands
again. I — ”

“For one thing,” said Walt-

er drily, “people who do that
are fools. For another, fools
though they are, they’re at
least planning for the future.
The men don’t expect to die.
Marriage is planning, Janet.
It isn’t diving into bed to-
gether today, because tomor-
row it may not seem such a
good idea. It’s meant to be — ”
“Forget what it’s meant to
be!” said Janet vehemently.
“We can’t plan for fifty years
together, maybe. Some mar-
riages don’t last a year any-
way.”

“I’m not going to marry
you knowing — ”

“Then we won’t get mar-
ried. I don’t care about mar-
riage. If you don’t want to get
married with this hanging
over you, I’ll move in with
you anyway.”

“What’s your mother going
to say about that?”

“What my mother says
doesn’t matter !”

Walt stood up. “Honey, the
longer we go on, the worse
it gets. I guess I’d better go.
Forget me as soon as you
can.”

Shutting his ears to her
cry, he strode out without a
glance over his shoulder.

THE FACT that Vee woke
at all showed that the
landing had been success-
ful and that conditions on the
planet she had landed on were
not entirely impossible.

But there was something
of at least equal importance

IN A BODY

9

to be settled before she could
think of going on living.

She threw the radio’s net
wide and switched on.

To her astonishment, she
was almost blasted out of her
tiny cell. There was more
radio communication of more
kinds on this world than on
any she knew.

This, then, was a civilized
world.

She didn’t know whether to
be glad or sorry.

For a while she thought of
Am, drawing a little strength
even from the memory of him.
He would want her to find
another soulmate, for he
would want her to live. They
had had no children, being
spacebound. Am would want
her to find another soulmate,
because only if she did so
could anything of him sur-
vive.

Vigintans needed compan-
ionship as they needed food
and water. Almost as neces-
sary as simple companionship
was a soulmate. Not just a
friend, not just a lover, but
a spouse so close physically,
mentally and spiritually that
nothing divided them, nothing
remained to divide them. Only
with such a soulmate could
any Vigintan approach hap-
piness.

For hours Vee listened to
the radio, concentrating with
every cell in her mind on
learning all she could of the
people of this world. Soon,
somehow, she must be able to

pass among them as one of
themselves, no matter what
they looked like.

As an alien you could be
liked, you could be respected,
you could even be revered.
But you couldn’t be loved.

So Vee had to become a hu-
man, down to the last physical
decimal point, so human that
she could reproduce as hu-
mans did, so human that it
could never occur to anybody
that she had ever been any-
thing else.

That, for her, was quite
possible.

Though she was no techni-
cian, the cathode tube was set
up so that even uninformed
fiddling would eventually try
every possible adjustment,
and at last she began to get
television pictures.

FROM then on, progress
was easy. Even before she
had any idea how these crea-
tures who called themselves
men and women were formed
under their curiously elastic
skins, she had begun to
change her appearance to con-
form with theirs.

It was fortunate, Vee
thought, that she was a wo-
man. Many hours of watching
TV gave her little or no in-
formation on the anatomy of
the males, but provided a
great deal about the anatomy
of females. She saw chorines'
legs flashing in so many rou-
tines that she was able to
work out in detail exactly

10

j. t. McIntosh

what the relevant bone and
muscle structure must be, and
set to work immediately to
reproduce it. An acrobat in
a costume which covered only
the primary and secondary
characteristics showed Vee
the entire bone structure of
the feminine torso, and she
made good use of the informa-
tion.

Certain details would have
to wait, of course. A visit to
a library — once she could
read — would probably fill in
most of the gaps left by tele-
vision.

Meantime she had enough
to do learning the language
and customs of these creatures
and modifying her body. She
would look and sound like a
human female long before she
really was one.

At night, when most trans-
missions ceased, she turned to
another problem — where her
ship had landed, and what she
was to use for food.

In accordance with stand-
ard practice, the lifeboat had
buried itself in soft ground
and pulled the hole in after
itself. Digging her way to the
surface — though her trans-
formation had begun, she was
still well equipped for digging
— Vee found to her delighted
amazement that she was right
in the middle of the richest
larder imaginable, covered by
it, hidden by it. She could eat
almost every form of vegeta-
tion, and she was in thick
undergrowth which already

had swung back to conceal the
passage of her tiny ship.

Collecting enough leaves to
last her for several days, she
returned to her ship, reflect-
ing that the only food difficul-
ties were going to be when she
was nearly human and could
no longer live on leaves, and
would need much more air
than she normally required.

However, that wouldn't be
for some days yet.

NEXT day, when radio
transmission started, she
was again busy.

Vigintans, like humans, had
enormously high potential
when all their interests were
at stake. Under the stress of
dire necessity, a man who
isn’t particularly brave, skill-
ful or intelligent will often do
things which are well beyond
his normal capacity. Vee, like-
wise, was able to employ sev-
eral times her normal capac-
ity in learning from radio and
TV, making the necessary de-
ductions and applying the re-
sults.

The finer points of the
psychology of these humans
were beyond her and might al-
ways be. But on the whole
they were decent enough
people, and, after all, among
all civilized races the funda-
mental principle of coopera-
tion was the same — I'll do
what you want if you do what
I want.

In fact, these humans even
put it in the form of a maxim :

IN A BODY

11

You scrateh my back and I'll
scratch yours.

No, Vee didn’t anticipate
any real trouble in dealing
with them and getting what
she wanted.

What she needed.

AS WALT came out into
the street, he heard his
name called. He turned before
he realized it would have been
much more sensible to pay no
attention.

In the car by the curb was
Janet.

“Look, Janet,” he said. “I
told you — ”

“Do you have to go there?”
she said bitterly. “Don’t you
know that if you’ve got to
have a woman, I’m waiting?”
He straightened and would
have walked on.

“I’ll drive after you,” she
said, “calling your name. Get
in and talk to me.”

He hesitated, then got in
beside her. Janet was showing
far more guts and persistence
and determination than he
had ever believed her capable
of — and he wished she

wouldn’t.

“Janet,” he said, “I was
right. I’m as good as dead.
Why can’t you just tell your-
self I’m dead now?”

“Walt, I don’t think you
know what love is. What kind
of a girl would walk out on
her man when he needs her
most?”

“I don’t need you. If we’d
been married, you’d have

12

stood by me. I know that. I’d
have expected it. But it’s
crazy to go on when there’s
no future for us. Find some
other guy. Do it now, instead
of waiting till they actually
screw the lid down on me.”
“Until you find some other
girl, I won’t leave you.”
“There isn’t going to be any
other girl. Why should I try
to make somebody else miser-
able because I’m going to die?
All I want is — ”

“To make a martyr of your-
self. To give up everything so
that you die with nothing,
with nobody caring about you,
so that you can feel sorry
for yourself and say, ‘Look
how cruel fate has been to
me.’ ”

“It’s not like that at all.
I just want to tie up some
loose ends.”

“Walt, you’re wrong, your
whole attitude’s wrong. The
natural, the right thing for a
man to do is begin new things
till the day he dies.”

“Let’s not get started on
that again, Janet.”

“If you think it’s wrong to
come to me, what’s so damned
right about going to a woman
like that?”

“I can’t hurt her,” said
Walt patiently. “She’s forgot-
ten me already. It was just a
business transaction.”

“And knowing you’re going
to a place like that is supposed
to make me wild with joy?”
“You’re not supposed to
know anything about me.

J. T. MclNTOSH

You're supposed to forget you
ever knew me.”

She was silent for a mo-
ment. Then she said: “I’ll
drive you home. I’m not
strong really, Walt. I can’t
keep up an argument for long.
I have to wait for a while
before I have strength to start
it again.”

“Then why start it,
honey?”

She began to cry quietly,
helplessly. It took all Walt’s
self-control to stop himself
from taking her in his arms,
but he succeeded.

Presently, blinking hard,
she started the motor and put
the car in gear.

IT WAS three o’clock in the
morning, and apart from
the soft, rustling sounds of
the country at night, all was
still. But down in the forest
something stirred.

It was an approximate girl
who weighed 118 pounds, was
five feet six inches tall,
blonde, and 38, 23, 37.

It was Vee.

She had no intention of
being seen by anyone this
trip.

Apart from lack of clothes,
she didn’t expect to pass as
a normal human female yet.
One difficulty was color. Tele-
vision didn’t show whether
her skin should be gray, pale
yellow, blue, green or pink.

By the time she returned
to her lifeboat, before dawn,
she hoped to have clothing,

money, and most of the bio-
logical information she still
lacked. She had no special ad-
vantages except her Vigintan
warning instinct, which was
better than the human vari-
ety. In addition to hearing,
sight and smell, she had a
kind of crude telepathy which
enabled her to place accurate-
ly— even with her eyes closed
— all living intelligences with-
in two or three hundred
yards.

The night was warm and
strongly moonlit. Vee had
chosen a moonlit night be-
cause her night vision was
no better than any human's,
and it was no good avoiding
being seen by picking a night
so dark that she couldn’t see
either.

She liked her human body,
which was more mobile and
nearly as tough as the one
it had replaced. Clothes were
a necessity, however, she
soon discovered, shivering
despite the exercise of walk-
ing. Shoes of some kind were
even more necessary than
clothes, for although grass
did her tender soles no harm,
stones and twigs underfoot
hurt them and made her pick
her route with care.

A dog came up to her
silently. Masking her fear, she
radiated strong reassurance.

To her relief, the dog was
so completely satisfied that he
lost interest, loping off as
silently as he came. Vee was
pleased as well as relieved.

IN A BODY

13

She knew from radio and TV
that dogs did a good deal of
their investigation with their
noses, and from the indiffer-
ence of this dog it was ob-
vious that her body scent
must be normal. This wasn’t
surprising, since her metabo-
lism was now entirely human,
even if all the details were
not quite settled. She was liv-
ing on fruit, berries, nuts and
vegetables.

It didn’t bother the dog
that she had no clothes on.

Presently she found a road
by seeing the headlights of a
car on it. A road must lead
somewhere, and a few min-
utes of patient waiting satis-
fied her that it was safe to
walk on it. If only one car
passed in twenty minutes, it
could hardly be a busy high-
way.

She walked a mile and saw
no more vehicles, met no one.
Another dog investigated her
much as the first one had
done. She saw several cats,
but they ignored her com-
pletely.

WHEN she saw the lights
of a town, she proceeded
with more caution. The street
lights were a nuisance. Al-
though the town seemed dead,
she didn’t dare walk along
the streets.

She crept behind the first
house. Three people inside, all
asleep. But the fourth house
was empty.

Twenty minutes spent ex-

amining the doors and win-
dows showed her the difficulty,
of her task. She had to steal
clothes and money. Later she
would return them somehow
or other; the Vigintan moral
code was strict in such mat-
ters. But with limited knowl-
edge of the people from whom
she was trying to steal, it
seemed to be impossible to
take anything without leaving
too many clues.

A fingerprint on a window
would be a clue. How much
more significant it would be,
she thought, to leave a finger-
print which wasn’t quite a
fingerprint . . .

In the end she had to take
the chance of entering an oc-
cupied house. Empty houses
were too well locked up. The
house she chose had an open
downstairs window.

There were two people in
the house, both upstairs.
Keeping her mental eye on
them all the time, Vee went
from room to room searching
for clothes. She found only
shoes which didn’t fit her.
Naturally enough, clothes
would be kept in bedrooms.

After half an hour of fum-
bling in the dark, not daring to
put on a light, Vee was get-
ting desperate. Soon she’d
have to start back to the life-
boat, and she had accomplish-
ed nothing yet.

She tried another house,
knowing five people were
asleep in it, two of them
downstairs. It was a large

14

J. T. MclNTOSH

house. Her reasoning was that
in such a house there was
more chance of things being
left around in more places.

In a room facing the back,
she switched on the light.
Caution had got her nowhere.
She soon found that reckless-
ness had brought a rich re-
ward.

She was in a spare bed-
room and all the drawers
were filled with clothes,
women’s clothes.

Wasting no time, she dress-
ed herself clumsily. Fortu-
nately television plays not in-
frequently showed women
dressing and undressing. She
selected rather the clothes
which might not be missed
for a while than those which
fitted best, although she gues-
sed the chances of their being
missed were remote.

There were no shoes. Dres-
sed in a sweater and skirt,
she searched in other rooms
and finally found a pair of
sandals which fitted fairly
well.

Unlike anybody else in
this world, she could make
her feet fit the shoes, given
time.

Leaving the house, she de-
cided to call it a night. She
was dressed after a fashion.
She had no idea how she
would look to a human, and
had no intention of finding out
immediately. Future forays
would be necessary.

She started to walk back
to her lifeboat.

IT TOOK Vee two weeks
more before she was ready
to risk meeting people. By the
end of that time she felt very
low, not having had any com-
panionship for so long. Only
the radio and television pro-
grams and hope had kept her
going.

She had borrowed some
medical books for a few
hours. She had watched people
from hiding. She had seen
dead bodies at the local
morgue.

And she had made herself
completely human, apart from
certain things which . she
didn’t abandon because she
couldn’t— like the ability to
change back to her own shape
and to exist, if necessary, on
vegetable matter which ordi-
nary humans would not regard
as food.

Naturally she had tried to
make herself as attractive as
possible. How far she had
been successful, she had no
means of knowing.

Money had remained a
problem for a long time. If
it was difficult to steal clothes,
it was ten times as difficult to
steal money. These humans —
of whom she thought, now, as
“people” — never seemed to
leave money lying around.
And if you did get your
hands on money which wasn’t
yours, you were pretty sure
to be caught.

For a while she considered
letting herself be caught.
She’d be put in jail and looked

IN A BODY

15

after, become somebody else’s
responsibility. But she dis-
carded the idea because that
way she’d forfeit too many
rights. Private citizens had a
lot of rights in this country,
though the radio sometimes
suggested that this wasn’t so
everywhere. Unless you for-
feited them by becoming a
criminal, you could do pretty
much what you liked here and
nobody interfered with you.

Her long hours of watching
and waiting around the vil-
lage, which she now knew was
called Slacksville, finally paid
off.

A storekeeper ran out
when there was an accident
in the street, and Vee was able
to rob the till. She felt miser-
able about it, but she knew
she had no choice. Without
money, you could get by if
you knew enough to get and
keep a job. With money, you
might be able to learn enough
to get a job.

She had a little over a hun-
dred dollars, not much, but all
she intended to steal.

Only fifty miles away, she
knew now, was a city — not
a big, important city, but
many times larger than the
tiny town which had unwill-
ingly furnished her immediate
needs.

She hid the lifeboat so com-
pletely that it might not be
found in a hundred years.
There was nothing to pack.
In her stolen sweater and
skirt, she walked ten miles in

16

the opposite direction from
Slacksville, strolled casually
into another small town, and
waited to see what would hap-
pen.

Nothing happened. A mid-
dle-aged woman looked at her
incuriously, a child gazed up
at her, a youth of seventeen
gave her the once-over. No-
body stared ; nobody looked
away quickly.

She had been successful,
then, but not completely suc-
cessful. She knew how boys
of seventeen were supposed
to react to the kind of girl she
had tried to make herself, and
this one conspicuously failed
to do so. However, that was
of less importance than the
thing which had already been
quite clearly established — she
could pass among humans as
one of them.

AT THE depot she bought
a ticket to the city. It was
the first time she had attempt-
ed human speech. The only re-
action she could observe was
indifference.

It was the same on the
train. Although glad that she
had been so successful in her
primary purpose, Vee was
conscious of pique too. In her
own world she had never been
so disregarded. Her feminine
reaction was that it would
be better to be downright ugly
than anonymous.

A girl in white was coming
along through the car. There
was a stir. Vee began to un-

j. t. McIntosh

derstand why nobody looked
twice at her.

The girl was cleaner than
a new nickel and shone as
brightly. Every dark hair was
in place. Her pink blush was
not natural, nor were her lush
dark-red lips, but there was
nothing natural about this
white, shiny, immaculate
creature. Her high breasts
were molded by nylon and
elastic, her flat stomach was
under rigid, unseen control,
her skin was a labor of chemi-
cal love.

Television hadn’t shown
such detail. Vee still had a lot
to learn. She was merely a
girl in an old sweater and
skirt that was new but only
fitted more or less.

When she reached the city,
she shut her eyes to its com-
plexity, its wonder. Later she
would look at it. First she
needed a place to stay.

She found one easily
enough, going through the
routine she had seen on tele-
vision : girl-arrives-in-city-

finds-apartment.

She told the myopic land-
lady, Mrs. Decker, that she
had left her luggage at the
station until she found a room.
Mrs. Decker was satisfied.

As Vee came out of her
room, intending to go out
again and take a look at the
immediate neighborhood of
179 Buckwash Street, a tall,
good-looking young man came
out of the next room. He had
black hair and rather pale

IN A BODY

skin, as if he spent a lot of
time indoors.

Vee smiled at him, and he
smiled back. He nearly said
something, but then he cleared
his throat unnecessarily, look-
ed away and popped back into
his room like a startled rab-
bit.

Vee didn’t recognize shy-
ness. She thought he just
wasn’t interested in a girl as
mediocre in appearance as she
was.

Since she hadn’t managed
to make herself into the kind
of glamour girl who, in tele-
vision at any rate, was al-
ways surrounded by attentive,
admiring males, it was obvi-
ously useless just to wait for
a soulmate to come along..
She’d have to go find one.

WALT saw Janet’s car half
a block away. “Damn,"
he said upder his breath. She
knew all the places he was
likely to go — half a dozen
times now, she had trapped
him and they had played out
half-bitter, half-tender scenes
in no essential respect differ-
ent from the first.

This time she hadn’t seen
him. He cut through the park.
Let her wait — if she missed
him often enough, maybe
she’d give up and go away.

He was tired of fighting
Janet and knew that his re-
sistance wouldn’t last much
longer — although he still pas-
sionately believed he was
right. Why couldn’t she see

17

what was so clear to him, that
if he thought only of himself,
he wouldn’t do this? It was
for Janet’s sake that he was
trying to break with her.

Finding himself at the en-
trance to Bill McEwan’s office,
Walt went in. He was sup-
posed to keep in touch.

McEwan was professionally
hearty, and Walt decided not
to call on him again. As Mc-
Ewan had already admitted,
he could do nothing. All he
had left was his bedside man-
ner.

As Walt was leaving, Mc-
Ewan said : “Girl came in this
morning asking if I could put
her in touch with people like
you. Said she belonged to some
organization I’d never heard
of, but it sounds good.

“You didn’t give her my
name, did you?”

“No, but I thought it might
interest you.”

Walt frowned at him. “Why
should you think that?”

“You might like to meet
this girl,” McEwan said.

Shrugging, Walt took a note
of her address : 179 Buckwash
Street.

Outside, he barely missed
running into Janet again. She
had moved her car.

Exasperated, he hoped that
the Friends of People with a
Year to Live, or whatever
they called themselves, might
be able to help him to get rid
of Janet. He headed toward
179 Buckwash Street.

“Miss Vee Brown?" said

18

the myopic landlady. “Yeah,
she’s in. Working in the base-
ment. You a chemist too?”

“In the basement?” Walt
said.

“Yeah, she rents it.”

Walt went down the stone
steps. He found a blonde in
a white smock working at a
lab bench.

She was quite pretty. Cold,
somehow, he thought.

As she came toward him,
wiping her hands, he said:
“I’m Walt Rinker. Dr. Mc-
Ewan said you’d been to see
him this morning . . .”

He left it like that, so that
she’d have to do the talking.

She nodded coolly. “You’re
a patient of his, Mr. Rinker?”
“Yes."

“You have an incurable
disease?”

“Yp<? ”

“Cancer?”

“Leukemia.”

“Mr. Rinker, this isn’t a
comfortable place to talk and
I can’t take you up to my
apartment. Would you have
coffee with me in the diner
next door?”

“Look,” he said. “This is
kind of silly. I came along
just out of curiosity. Frank-
ly, I came because I wondered
about you.”

“About me?”

“It was a fool thing to do.
I don’t need any help, I’ve got
plenty of money, my mind
isn’t going to collapse under
the strain. Sorry to have both-
ered you. Miss Brown.”

j. t. McIntosh

“You mean you want to go
now?”

For the first time he sensed
emotion in her. And it was
emotion of startling intensity.
He began to think she was a
nut, the kind of eccentric who
felt she had a mission.

As he was about to turn
and go up the steps again,
being as rude as might be
necessary to get away from
her, she took off her lab
smock and said quietly : “Well,
it won’t hurt to talk here for
half an hour.”

“No, I guess not,” he said.

They sat down.

VEE hadn’t found it hard
to make money after all.
From television and radio she
had learned that although
fortunes could be made at
race tracks with very little
outlay, betting on horses was
generally considered a gamble.

Still, she had visited a race
track to confirm this view of
the matter. And she had
found that, for her, betting
on horses wasn’t foolish at all.

You could see the runners,
that was the point. And Vee,
with the trained eye of a
species which could change its
own physical structure at will,
could establish an awful lot
from seeing the runners. She
could not merely tell the best,
strongest fastest horses; far
more important, she could
form a pretty good impres-
sion of the probable winners.
There were failures, of

IN A BODY

course. At first she didn’t
properly understand the math-
ematics of this particular
form of betting. Even when
she did, the horse which
should have won didn’t al-
ways win. And when the
probable winner was short-
priced, a bet in the small sums
she could spare was neither
economically sound nor partic-
ularly productive.

But she wasn’t compelled
to bet on short-priced horses.
And the advantage of her
special sense was that when
a long shot was going to come
up, Vee was the only one at
the course who knew it before-
hand.

She soon had enough money
for her immediate needs. The
first thing she did was buy
some clothes.

She had discovered, mean-
time, one of the peculiarities
of this society. If you were
willing to be labeled a crank,
you could get away with
practically anything.

Walt Rinker wasn’t the first
person who had come to see
her. There had been three
hypochondriacs and two can-
cer cases too far gone for her
to do anything for them.

She didn’t know yet
whether she could do anything
for Walter, but he was the
first to interest her person-
ally.

She decided, at the end of
the half-hour, that he was to
be her soulmate.

As they emerged from the

19

basement, she stopped at the
foot of the stairs.

“I have to go upstairs for
a moment,” she said. “You’ll
wait?”

“Sure.”

She hesitated for a moment
longer. Now that he had seen
her, he might make his escape
thankfully. However, she
couldn’t handcuff him to her
— yet.

Running lightly up to her
apartment, she once again
passed Billy Clark, the tall,
good-looking boy in the next
room.

“Miss Brown,” he said, put-
ting out his hand as if to
stop her.

“Yes?” she said. She tried
not to betray her impatience,
but her hand came up to open
her door. The sooner she got
back to Walt, the less chance
there would be of finding him
gone.

“Nothing,” he muttered.
“Some other time.”

Vee went in, unlocked the
middle drawer of the dressing
table and took out a small
package. She would have liked
to change into something
more glamorous than the in-
determinate blue dress she
was wearing, but didn’t want
to take the risk that Walt
would walk out on her. Put-
ting the package in her hand-
bag, she turned and went out
again.

To her surprise, Billy Clark
was still waiting outside. She
smiled at him automatically.

20

He opened his mouth to speak,
but before anything came out,
she was halfway down the
stairs.

It was a relief to find that
Walt had not gone away.

DRINKING coffee in an al-
cove, Walt was still sorry
he had come. Vee Brown was,
of course, a nut. The trouble
was that she wasn’t even an
interesting nut. She talked
characterlessly, like the people
in bad scripts who said merely
what the plot required them
to say.

She asked him quite a few'
questions which he answered
truthfully but briefly.

“How about me asking
something for a change?” he
said. “Just what is all this
about?”

She looked at him steadily.
“Mr. Rinker, are you pre-
pared to try out an experi-
mental cure for leukemia?”
Walt was suddenly angry.
“Think I’m crazy? There’s no
cure.”

“Then you lose nothing.”
“And gain nothing.”

She shook her head. “That’s
not true. If my method doesn’t
cure you, at least it will give
you longer to live.”

He was still angry. “Who |
do you think you’re fooling? j
If there was a cure, every •
newspaper in the world would j
be carrying the story.”

“Not if they didn’t know
about it. And nobody does.”

“A thing like this would be

j. t. mcintosh

known about long before it
happened. People don’t dis-
cover things by accident any
more.”

“Don’t they? Offhand, I
seem to remember reading
that isoniazid, the TB drug,
was a byproduct of rocket re-
search. Besides, did I say this
cure was discovered by acci-
dent?”

“There isn’t a cure!” he
almost shouted, trembling.

Not until this girl claimed
to be able to cure him had he
realized how much he wanted
to live.

You were told you had
leukemia and were going to
die. It was like the moment
after an injury when some-
how you didn’t lose conscious-
ness. There was no pain yet,
only numbness.

And mercifully the numb-
ness went on. There was no
argument with cancer or
leukemia. You might live
longer than they said, or not
as long, but you were under
sentence.

With tuberculosis, meningi-
tis, tumors, almost anything
else, there was a chance. With
leukemia, death wasn’t a mat-
ter of if; it was a matter of
when.

And that maintained the
numbness, the numbness out
of which Walt had been able
to withstand the pleas of
Janet, knowing he was right.

Now, irresponsibly, this
woman made him face the
thought of being cured, the

IN A BODY

thought of being able to go to
Janet and say . . .

As he stared down at Vee,
it suddenly seemed to him
that he had never known any-
body who looked less crazy.
Cold she was, apart from that
moment in the basement when
for a moment her feelings had
broken through, but it was the
coldness of a girl who was
under strict, almost unnatural
self-control.

If a girl of twenty-five or so
did happen to have a cure for
leukemia, she might be like
this girl, act like this girl.

He sat down, still not be-
lieving in Vee, still hating her.

Vee felt his hatred and fail-
ed to understand it. She was
bewildered and frightened.
This was the man she had
chosen as her soulmate, unless
he had any really serious de-
fect of temperament. It was
a simple bargain — she would
give him life and he would
be hers. Other women in his
life, whether he was married
or not, didn’t matter. The
other women couldn’t save
him; Vee could.

Surely any reasonable crea-
ture, human or otherwise,
would accept life with her as
an alternative to death. If for
no other reason, gratitude
would compel Walt to do as
she wished.

“Why do you hate me?” she
asked steadily.

“You’ve made me hope,” he
said. “I know you’re a sensa-
tion-seeking nut. But you’ve

21

made me think what it would
be like not to die.”

Vee felt better. She could
understand that. “I know.”
“Tell me about this cure of
yours. How does it work?
Convince me.”

“You don’t have to be con-
vinced. It works whether you
understand it or not, like
serum or antibiotics.”

Damn it, was there ever
such inhuman self-control ?
She didn’t even seem to feel
the need to justify herself.

“Tell me about it all the
same,” he said furiously.

Vee considered. Could she
tell him about the restorer?

ON VEE’s world, evolution
had demanded the ability
to change one’s physical
shape. Back in the savage
days, long before the first stir-
rings of civilization, the way
to survive had been periodic
metamorphosis. The briffs,
the keymors, all the different
types of mally, each in turn
had ruled the world — physi-
cally. Mentally, Vee’s race had
always been supreme. But
Vee’s race (which never had a
name of its own, for its mem-
bers called themselves and
were the creatures they hap-
pened to be duplicating at the
time) was not warlike. Unable
to survive by fighting, they
had survived by being their
enemies.

Later, much later, the other
races of the Vigintan worlds
so objected to this habit that

22

Vee’s race signed an agree-
ment never to imitate any of
the Vigintan species. Al-
though this promise was
scrupulously kept, Vee and her
people could no more lose the
faculty of metamorphosis
than a man with ears among
deaf people could forget how
to hear.

A human male with this
faculty might retain his hu-
man shape, but he would make
himself tall, strong and hand-
some. A human female would
make herself independent of
aids to beauty, as Vee had
done, merely by making mus-
cles of the necessary tone and
strength.

Members of Vee’s race died,
usually, of disease peculiar to
the kind of creature they hap-
pened to be emulating. They
were particularly susceptible,
for they made themselves, in
effect, into pure, perfect, ex-
act, immaculate specimens —
without, of course, even the
slightest experience of any of
the relevant diseases. Once ill,
changing again didn’t help. In
effect, they took the disease
with them.

When technology began,
however, the restorer was de-
veloped. And hardly anyone
ever died any more except in
accidents or of extreme old
age.

The restorer was a tiny ob-
ject manufactured from bod-
ily secretions. In a sense, it
was alive. It was certainly
organic. Yet it was only a

j. t. McIntosh

pattern — a pattern of the kind
of life-form the creature who
secreted it was imitating. It
was the essence of the species,
so basic that it would be the
same for Asiatic, Negro or
Occidental, man or woman,
child or oldster.

On becoming ill, you swal-
lowed the restorer — part nat-
ural, part artificial. It spread
in the blood to brain, heart,
lungs. And the whole physical
effort of the body was directed
to the restoration of the nat-
ural pattern — normal good
health.

When the other Vigintan
races discovered that the re-
storer worked for them too,
Vee’s people suddenly became
exceedingly popular, and their
peculiar gift, hitherto regard-
ed with suspicion at least,
made them everybody’s
friend.

That was all very well in
the Vigintan worlds, but Vee
could hardly explain any of
this to Walt.

“No,” she said. She took
a small pill from her handbag.
“Swallow that without chew-
ing it and your cure be-
gins.”

He took it and looked at it
— an ordinary white pill. Once
again he felt anger and frus-
tration rise in him. A little
white pill like that couldn’t
do any good.

He looked up at Vee. “What
do you get out of this whole
business?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

IN A BODY

“At the moment? And
later?”

“I am not after money,” she
said firmly.

Confused, suspicious, Walt
put the pill in his mouth and
swallowed it.

Barring accidents, he was
cured now. Although the proc-
ess of cure had barely start-
ed, it was complete. He needed
nothing more. But Vee didn’t
propose to tell him that yet.

“You’re a chemist?” Walt
said uncertainly.

She nodded.

He wanted to believe in her,
was afraid to believe in her.
“Did you work for any of the
big firms?”

She smiled. “Go home.
Come back here the night
after next.”

“Go home?”

She stood up. “In about an
hour you’ll feel lightheaded,”
she said. “It won’t be unpleas-
ant and you’ll be all right if
you lie down. The less you do
tomorrow, the better. If you
get up, stay in a chair all day.
You’ll probably be hungry.
Eat anything you like. Come
back the following night.”

Maintaining her incredible
composure to the end, she
walked out. Walt went to the
desk to pay the bill, but she
had even done that.

VEE SPENT the next day
at the race track win-
ning carefully, not spectacu-
larly. Some day she would
have to arrange an entirely

23

honest income. She didn’t con-
sider betting on horses honest
for her, any more than it
would be honest for her to bet
on the number of peas in a
bottle when she knew the
answer.

She had already sent money
anonymously to various ad-
dresses in Slacksville. Eventu-
ally she intended to return
her winnings by the simple
means of making losing bets
to the right bookmakers.

Vigintan morality was dif-
ferent from human morality.
There was no arguing with it.

On the morning of the day
Walt was to call, she rented
a large but discreet apart-
ment in a different part of the
city, and spent the rest of the
day putting it in order.

In the evening she returned
to 179 Buckwash Street, and
when Walt called, she took
him out immediately and di-
rected a taxi driver to take
them to the new apartment.

“Where are we going?”
Walt demanded.

“Wait and see.”

“Miss Brown, I — ”

“You might as well call me
Vee.”

She was as cool as ever, but
twice as pretty as he remem-
bered. In fact, she was an
astonishingly beautiful girl —
astonishing because, although
she was undoubtedly the same
girl, she hadn’t left him with
that impression before. If
only she acted like — well, not
necessarily like Janet, but like

24

any other girl, with likes and
dislikes, a sense of humor,
perhaps, not just that same
cool, impersonal manner all
the time — she could be a re-
markably attractive woman.
Not that that was anything
to him, of course.

“Vee,” he said, “I don’t
know what’s been happening
to me, but something has. I
feel — I feel as if there’s a fire
in my body, but a soothing
fire. Vee, tell me the truth.
Am I really getting better?”

“You should be,” she said.

“And that’s all there is to
it — taking a pill?”

That was all there was to
it, but Vee had far too slight
a hold on him so far to tell
him that. The interval of
forty-eight hours had been
carefully calculated. She want-
ed him to believe that he was
being cured, not that he was
already cured.

“Pills,” she amended.

“For how long?”

“It depends. When you’re
cured, you can stop taking
pills.”

“But . . . Vee . . . How come,
if this works as you say, no-
body knows about it? Why
don’t you shout it from the
rooftops?”

“Walt, I want you to prom-
ise me not to tell anybody
what’s happening to you
meantime. When I do release
it, I want to know exactly
what it is and what it will
do.”

“Sure, but every day people

j. t. McIntosh

are dying who might be — ”

“Walt, I promise you that
the treatment will be made
available to everybody when
I know how to handle it. In
fact, you’ll help me, won’t
you?’’

He didn’t get a chance to
answer, for the cab had drawn
up and Vee was getting out.

The apartment stupefied
him. As he looked at its pastel
shades with the occasional
splashes of saturated color,
his eyes narrowed thought-
fully and he turned presently
to look at Vee with a certain
speculation which had been
absent from his gaze so far.

With her near-telepathic
sense, she realized at once that
though she personally had not
struck him as strange enough
for any suspicion of the truth
about her origin to cross his
mind, she had overreached
herself in the decoration of
the apartment — although it
had been done rapidly and
sketchily with furniture ob-
tainable from stock, and al-
though much had been left
as she had found it. From
the moment when she had first
seen an image form in the
screen in her lifeboat, she had
been concentrating on model-
ing herself on the kind of hu-
man female whom human
males liked. She had devoted
only a passing glance to the
kind of decor they were ac-
customed to.

“Do you like it?” she said.
“I'm going to have the walls

IN A BODY

green, but the ceiling and
lighting could stay, don’t you
think?”

His vague, formless suspi-
cion dissolved and was wash-
ed away. But he asked : “Why
do you have two apartments?”

She shrugged. “This is
where I’m going to live. The
other is rented till the end of
the week. Would you like a
drink?”

He hesitated. Although he
had dismissed from his mind
the curious first impression
that the room had had on him,
the strangeness of this woman
and her behavior and the
effect of the pill she had given
him made him uneasy.

“Why did you bring me
here?” he asked.

Vee was uneasy too. He
just didn’t react the way he
was supposed to. She had
changed her dress and ap-
pearance slightly, subtly, and
had sensed at first that she
was making a better impres-
sion on him than on their first
meeting.

“I want to make some
tests,” she said.

“Then hadn’t you better do
that before you offer me a
drink?”

“I guess so, yes.”

The undercurrent felt
wrong. She would have to try
something, anything. “What
do you think of me?” she
asked abruptly.

“You’re a strange girl.”

The words told her some-
thing, but not as much as

25

what accompanied them did.
You’re cold. You smile, but
you don’t laugh. I just don’t
know what makes you tick.

“Wait here a minute/' she
said, and went through to her
bedroom, closing the door be-
hind her.

SHE COULD abandon Walt
and find someone else.
Love, for members of Vee’s
race, was less capricious than
among humans. They found
possible soulmates — which

was easy, with their near-tele-
pathy— and gradually, pro-
gressively, loved them. There
were no second thoughts.

Already Vee felt too much
for Walt to be willing to tear
herself from him and start
anew. But she could do it. She
could do it now. With every
hour she spent with him, it
got tougher. Soon it would be
impossible.

She made up her mind,
shrugging away her doubts.
If she failed with Walt, why
should she succeed with any
other human male?

Her present tactics were
wrong, that was all. She re-
membered a television play
about a girl scientist. Men
thought her a washout when
she wore glasses and a lab
smock. But she was a wow
when her hair came loose, and
she got a little drunk, and the
plot somehow got her into a
bathing suit.

Vee would start again — re-
membering that her excuse

26

for keeping Walt here was the
necessity of making tests of
one sort or another.

Walt looked up as she em-
erged with a syringe.

“I want samples of your
blood,” she said. “I’m going to
take a count in one hour, two
hours, and three hours.”
“Mean you want me to stay
for three hours?”

“I’d have you stay all night,
only I don’t want you claim-
ing I raped you.”

She giggled at his expres-
sion. But she drew off the
blood sample competently, ex-
cept that a drop fell on her
skirt

“Siob,” she said. “Why
don’t you watch where you’re
bleeding?”

“What are you going to do
with that blood?” Walt asked.
“Get it off if I can.”

“I don’t mean on your skirt.
What are you going to do with
the sample?”

“Drink it, of course.”

She went back in the other
room. A moment later she put
her head out the door. “Walt,
make yourself useful. The
bathroom’s through there. See
if you can get this clean.”
She threw something at him
which proved to be her skirt.

When she came back in five
minutes, she was wearing a
short wrap which showed she
had exceedingly beautiful
legs. “Don’t stare at me as if
I weren’t wearing anything
underneath,” she said. “I am.
Look.”

j. t. McIntosh

She flicked her wrap and
Walt saw she was wearing
white panties. At the same
time he saw she wasn’t wear-
ing anything else.

“Look, Vee,” he said. “We
might as well get one thing
clear now, in case there’s any
misunderstanding. I’ve got a
girl, Janet. We’d be married
except that I wouldn’t get
married with this hanging
over me. If I do get better,
it’s Janet for me. Is that
clear?”

“Sure,” said Vee. “I under-
stand English real good.”

Walt persisted. “I mean
Janet’s the only girl for me.
When I thought I was going
to die, I tried to brush her
off. But if I don’t die — well,
there’s going to be nobody else
but Janet.”

About that, Vee thought,
there may be two opinions.

“Have a drink,” Vee said.

She got inside the skin of
the character she had adopted.
She was frank, outspoken,
warmly sexy, inviting. And
Walt had a good time with
her. She laughed easily and he
wondered dazedly why he’d
ever thought she was cold and
stiff.

After an hour, she left him
for a few minutes. Returning,
she gave him another small
white pill.

“Walt,” she said solemnly,
“I think you’re going to be all
right. I’ll check again later,
but I can tell you now — keep
up the treatment and your

IN A BODY

worries are over. Let’s have
a drink to celebrate.”

They had a drink to cele-
brate. They had several
drinks.

And eventually, despite his
excellent resolutions, the alco-
hol and the proximity of Vee
and the sure knowledge that
she was ready and willing
broke down his resistance.

At first he merely had an
irresistible impulse to fold
back the collar of her wrap.
Finding himself practically
kissing her, he did kiss her.

Vee was sure enough of
herself and him to whisp-
er mockingly : “Remember

Janet, Walt.”

“The hell with Janet,” he
said hoarsely.

BUT THE next day things
looked different to him.
Wakening about eleven o’-
clock, Walt lost no time in
getting dressed, hardly look-
ing at Vee.

Despite the hard drinking
they’d been doing, he felt bet-
ter than he had for months.
There remained no doubt in
his mind that he was going to
be well again.

And it suddenly became a
matter of desperate urgency
to see Janet.

“Tonight again, Walt,” Vee
said before he left.

“How long do I have to
keep taking pills?”

“Every night.”

“Can’t you give me them

now?”

27

“No. I’ve got to keep check-
ing results.”

He shrugged. Her methods
might be peculiar, but appar-
ently they worked. He felt the
need to say something more,
feeling the awkwardness that
a man always feels when
something has happened
which the girl takes much
more seriously than he does.

“Vee, I—”

“Don’t talk now,” she said.
‘The morning’s no time for
talking. Tell me one thing,
though — do you like my
dress?”

He couldn’t help grinning.
She wasn’t wearing a dress.

HE hurried out, took a cab
and waited impatient-
ly at the Kentucky House,
where Janet generally lunch-
ed. For weeks Janet had been
chasing him relentlessly, beg-
ging, pleading, crying, argu-
ing, demanding, insisting. The
last time they had had a scene
had been just before he met
Vee. With his mind he knew
there was no chance that
Janet had suddenly changed,
yet in his heart he was ter-
ribly afraid that just at the
moment when he had decided
with infinite gladness that he
could marry her after all, she
had decided to take him at
his word and never see him
again.

As the minutes passed and
she didn’t come, he cursed
himself for being so definite.
Yet how could he have known

that a miracle was going to
happen? Short of a miracle,
he had meant all he said to
Janet. But if only he hadn’t
been quite so hard, quite so
certain . . .

The food in front of him
didn’t interest him at first.
He’d been pecking at his
meals for months, and despite
what Vee had said, he hadn’t
been particularly hungry the
day before. However, when
he started pecking as usual,
he ate everything in sight,
ordered more, and finally stop-
ped eating only because he
didn’t believe it could be right
to go on eating until he burst.

Besides, there was Janet.
She didn’t come in to lunch.
After his enormous meal, he
went to her home. Her
mother, surprised and doubt-
ful at sight of him, said no,
she wasn’t home, no, she
wasn’t out of town, yes, she’d
be home around eight.

“Tell her to phone me when
she comes in,” said Walt. He
gave Vee’s number, for he’d
be at her apartment at eight.

It would be just as well, he
decided, to make things quite
clear. He’d tell Vee he expected
Janet to call, and she could
listen to him talking to Janet.

Maybe that was cruel to
Vee, to whom he owed his
life. Maybe he shouldn’t have
arranged things that way. But
he had already told Vee about
Janet, and the sooner she
knew he meant what he said,
the better.

28

J. T. MdNTOSH

WHEN he arrived at her
apartment that night, she
was already in a wrap, a long
white negligee this time, and
he was glad he had left a
message for Janet to phone
him here.

“Look, Vee,” he said ab-
ruptly, “you were very sweet
last night. But I told you I
was going to marry Janet,
and I meant it. You under-
stood that, didn’t you?”

“If we’re going to have a
stand-up fight,” said Vee
pleasantly, “let’s at least sit
down first.”

He sat as far away from
her as he could.

“I shouldn’t have stayed
here last night,” he said. “Be-
cause I knew at the time that
to you it was more than . . .
I mean we’d only just met,
and yet somehow I knew that
you — ”

“That I meant to marry
you,” said Vee.

Her calm certainty startled
him. “Well — yes. But I told
you about Janet, Vee. I meant
it.”

“So that made it all right
to sleep with me.”

“Vee, Janet’s going to phone
me here. I’m going to tell her
that I’m asking her to marry
me again.”

“How often have you been
married to her?”

“You know what I mean,
damn it.”

Vee crossed her legs and lay
back. “If there’s going to be
straight talking,” she said,

IN A BODY

“you can have the last word. I
want the first.”

“If there’s going to be
straight talking,” Walt said,
“pull that wrap over your legs
and shut it at the top. I’m not
made of wood.”

“No,” said Vee mildly, “I
know that, Walt.”

She left her wrap the way it
was.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,”
she said. “When you were go-
ing to die, you weren’t going
to marry Janet. Now that
you’re going to live, you want
her back.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry, Walt. Under
those conditions, you don’t get
better.”

He caught his breath.
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say. It’s a
simple bargain, Walt. Marry
me and I’ll cure you. Marry
Janet and you die.”

He was staring at her in
horror. “You’re crazy!”

“Not at all. I didn’t mean to
put it so bluntly so soon, Walt.
I wanted to help you forget
Janet and perhaps never have
to deliver an ultimatum. But
you’ve forced me to.”

He shook his head incredu-
lously. She was as calm, as
businesslike as she had been
earlier in their acquaintance.
But for Janet, he might have
loved the other Vee, the warm-
er, exciting Vee. This one he
didn’t like, Janet or no Janet.

In the silence, the phone
rang.

29

HE GOT up to answer it.

Vee got up too. As if
aware of what he had just
been thinking, she was laugh-
ing, playful. She barred his
way.

“I’m going to speak to Jan-
et,” he said.

“You said yourself you
wouldn’t marry her unless you
recovered. And if you marry
her, you don’t recover. So why
speak to her?”

He tried to get past her. She
dodged in front of him again.
Grasping her firmly, he tried
to push her to one side. But
he was still not a well man and
she was as strong as he was.
He pulled at her shoulder and
her wrap tore and hung to the
swell of her hip at one side.
She only laughed.

The bell was still ringing.
Furious, he aimed a vicious
blow at Vee. She caught his
arm and they both fell to the
floor.

“If your Janet could see you
now,” she giggled breathless-
ly, “there would certainly be
no wedding.”

Having gained the superior
position, he tried to get up.
Vee held his leg and though he
kicked savagely, he couldn’t
get free.

The bell stopped ringing. At
once Vee let go. Walt dived to
the phone and picked it up.
“Janet? Janet? This is Walt.
Janet?”

Silence.

He slammed the phone
down. Vee was getting to her

30

feet. “I could kill you!” he
said.

“I doubt it.”

He picked up the phone
again and started to dial. Vee
moved behind him, and as he
finished dialing, she mischiev-
ously presented him with the
cut end of the phone cable.

Without thinking, he chop-
ped at her with his fist. She
went down in a heap at his
feet.

At once he was sorry, and
picked her up. He carried her
to the couch and was laying
her gently on it when she
opened her eyes and said con-
versationally: “This is nice.”

He dropped her angrily.

She sat up. “Walt, when you
think about it, it isn’t such a
bad bargain. Would you hon-
estly really rather die than
marry me?”

“I don’t get it,” he said bit-
terly. “You’re young and
you’re anything but ugly. Why
does it have to be me?”

“Because . . .” But she was-
n’t going to tell him it was
because Billy Clark, when he
had first seen her, had merely
looked at her, smiled automati-
cally and dived into his room.
Because she had to have a
soulmate, and soon. Because,
for all her efforts, men didn’t
go mad at sight of her, and
even after what had happened
between her and Walt, he
wanted to cast her aside and
marry his Janet.

Because she had to be able
to keep her man with her, and

j. t. McIntosh

if she couldn't do it without a
leash and a collar, there had
to be a leash and collar.

Because if she didn’t have a
soulmate she would die.

If Walt only knew it, she
had no hold over him. The pill
she would give him soon look-
ed like the restorer she had
given him that first night, but
it was nothing, did nothing.
She had already done all she
could for him.

“Don’t you owe me some-
thing, Walt?” she said.

“I don’t owe you the rest of
my life.”

“Don’t you?”

“Look, Vee, let’s look at this
calmly. I can’t marry you and
you wouldn’t want me to,
knowing I love Janet.”

“You won’t go on loving
Janet.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.”

SHE was certain of that.

Given a chance, she could
mold herself to Walt so com-
pletely that he would talk of
Janet shamefacedly as “a girl
I used to know.” Given time,
Vee and Walt could be as close
as any human couple in the
world. She was in no doubt
about that. Only she had to be
given the chance, given time.

Walt tried again. “Vee, I
thought at first you were
pretty cold, but I don’t now.
You’re a woman.”

“Thanks, Walt. I always
wondered about that.”

“If you really believed, real-

IN A BODY

ly knew you couldn’t have me,
you wouldn’t condemn me to
death. I know that.”

Vee knew it too. Sooner or
later she’d have to give the
restorer to everybody ; cer-
tainly she couldn’t let Walt
die, even if she lost him. It
was unfortunate that he
guessed that.

“Oh, you’d be surprised how
callous I can be,” she said
lightly.

They talked it back and
forth, sometimes calmly,
sometimes angrily. Vee didn’t
shift her ground.

When the door chimes
sounded and Vee went to open
the door, Walt didn’t move. It
didn’t seem to be anything to
him that somebody was calling
on Vee.

It was only when Janet
came in, white and rigid, and
he saw Vee’s mocking smile,
that he realized that Vee had
known all along who it would
be.

“So this is what you wanted
to tell me,” said Janet. Neatly
dressed in a blue wool suit, she
looked almost boyish beside
the flamboyant Vee, her wrap
torn down one side to her
rounded hips.

“You must be Janet,” Vee
said. “I’m sure you’d like a
drink.”

“Janet, I want to marry
you,” Walt said.

Janet didn’t look at Vee.
“Once I said I wouldn’t leave
you until you found some
other girl. Now you have.”

31

“I haven’t . . . Listen, Janet,
Vee is a chemist. She has a
treatment — I’m not going to
die.”

Yes you are, if you marry
her. That was on the tip of
Vee’s tongue, but she stopped
herself in time and didn’t say
it. The effect would be to put
Janet on Walt’s side against
her.

There were tears in Janet’s
voice. “Walt, honey, I told you

32

all along if you wanted a girl I
was waiting.”

“Janet, I don’t love Vee.
Please believe that.”

“It’s true,” said Vee. “He
beats me all the time.”

“She’s damnably clever,
Janet,” Walt said. “Every-
thing she’ll say will be meant
to turn you against me. She
wants to marry me.”

“I didn’t know I was at the
end of a line of girls all want-

j. t. McIntosh

ing to marry you,” Janet whis- “What does that prove?”
pered. “I thought you were all Janet asked doubtfully,
mine, Walt. I thought you “It shows I was trying to
needed me.” talk to you, and she was try-

Vee laughed. ing to stop me.”

Like an animal at bay, The atmosphere changed.

Walt looked wildly around

him. And suddenly he "l^EE was more desperate

pounced. “Look!” he shouted. ▼ than Walt, although she
“When you phoned earlier, didn’t show it. She was fight-

she wouldn’t let me answer, ing, literally, for her life.

And then she cut the cord. Having feelings, she was
See?” sorry for Janet. But if Janet

IN A BODY

33

lost Walt, she wouldn’t die.
Janet was young and pretty,
and within three months
Janet would have another
man crazy about her.

In three months Vee could
perhaps have a man crazy
about her too, only Vee
couldn’t wait tnree months.
Without a soulmate, she was
on the point of perishing
now. She couldn’t afford to
lose Walt.

“Have a drink, Janet,” she
said.

“How long have you
known her?” Janet demanded.

“Three days,” said Walt.

“Three nights,” Vee mur-
mured.

Walt spun on her. “For
Pete’s sake, go put something
on, Vee!”

“All right,” she said mildly,
knowing Walt didn’t expect
that.

AS she left them together,
Vee was aware that if
they had the sense to walk
out together, she had lost.
She banked on Janet being
slow to forgive.

When the door closed be-
hind her, Walt said rapidly:
“Janet, she can cure me. Be-
lieve that. But now she’s
blackmailing me. Either I
marry her or there won’t be
any cure.”

“I don’t understand any
part of this,” Janet said
wearily, “except that you and
she are lovers.”

Walt should have had an

34

answer ready. Silence was
worse than anything he might
have said.

“So its true,” she whis-
pered.

“Janet, I’m only flesh and
blood, and she — ”

“I’m only flesh and blood
too. What was wrong with
me?”

“If you’ll only let me ex-
plain— ”

Vee came back, cool and
elegant in a white dress.
Janet looked at her and Vee’s
fabulous figure made her jeal-
ous and unsure. Part of her
said, “It’s only natural that
Walt should forget himself
with a girl like that. Forgive
him.” The rest of her said,
“If only Vee had been ugly,
I wouldn’t have minded so
much.”

Janet wasn’t conceited,
wasn’t sure of herself. When
her rival was a girl like Vee,
what chance had she?

“Have a drink, Janet,” Vee
said.

“Is that how it was?”
Janet asked Walt bitterly.
“You were drunk?”

“She made me stay. There
were tests. Some blood got on
her skirt.”

“So naturally she took it
off. Any girl would. And you
. . . you and she ...”

Janet was well brought up.
She could think things, but
she couldn’t say them.

“Janet, you’re a nice girl,”
Vee said. “I don’t think you
quite understand Walt.”

j. t. McIntosh

“That’s right. I don’t. Ob-
viously I never did.”

“Janet, will you listen?”
Walt begged. “Vee said she
could cure me. I had nothing
to lose. I tried her way. And
it works. Already I feel so
much better that today I went
to the Kentucky House to
look for you, to ask you to
marry me. But you didn’t
come.”

“So you came here instead.
And left a message for me to
phone you here.”

“Don’t you care that now
I may live?”

“With her. You can live
with Vee. She can keep you
going. You need her. You
never needed me.”

“Janet, I’m telling you —
I’m not going to die.”

“If you can only live with
her, I don’t care if you do
die!” Janet said crying. As
usual, she could keep her end
up so long, no longer. She
turned blindly toward the
door.

And Vee made her first
mistake. “That’s all she cares,
Walt,” she said. “As far as
she’s concerned, you can die
right now.”

Janet spun around, finding
more courage from some-
where. “No,” she said broken-
ly. “No, I was wrong. If she
can really cure you, Walt,
stay with her. I can’t do any-
thing for you. I never could,
could I?”

Vee laughed with sudden
joy.

IN A BODY

She thought she had won.
But she had lost.

JANET was in Walt’s arms
and her tears weren’t en-
tirely tears of grief. Vee felt
their love for each other, a
bond that shut her out, a rec-
onciliation which had noth-
ing to do with facts or
explanations.

“I need more treatment,
honey,” Walt said. “She says
I don’t get it unless I marry
her.”

Vee tried the old, unan-
swerable, logical argument
again. “With Janet, you die.
And you won’t marry Janet
unless you live. You’d decided
that before you ever heard of
me. What’s changed?”

“Janet, you were right and
I was wrong,” Walt said
softly. “Vee showed me that.
I’d rather go with you, and
die, than with her and live.”
Vee’s shoulders slumped
and her figure suddenly was-
n’t fabulous any more.

It was physical, mental and
spiritual, this need of her race
to have a soulmate. In the
end it would be physically
that she would die, but not
until the two other sides of
her had already disintegrated.

She could hold out so long,
as a man could hold out so
long without food or water,
getting weaker all the time.
But since the mental part
was so important, dissolution
could be rapid.

It wasn’t selfish, the love of

35

Vee’s race. It had to go out
and come back. From Walt it
had never really come back —
yet with the confidence that
it soon would, Vee had been
able to carry on. The moment
she knew, however, knew
with complete certainty that
Walt was not for her, she felt
all the staggering weight of
all these lonely weeks, empty
of everything but hope.

She couldn’t fight any more.
She could hardly speak.

“Go away, both of you,"
she said weakly. “Walt, you
won’t die. You don’t need any
more treatment."

Janet emerged from Walt’s
arms, blinking, to stare at
Vee in dawning realization.
“You did love him," she mur-
mured. “You really do love
him.”

“Go away," Vee said, drop-
ping loosely in a chair.

“Are you all right, Vee?”
Walt said, suddenly solicit-
ous. It seemed incredible that
only a few minutes before
Vee had been dominating the
situation, and they had both
hated and feared her.

“Yes. Go away. You’ll be
all right, Walt.”

They didn’t press their
luck. They almost tiptoed out,
arms around each other.

For a long time Vee didn't
move. But even in her des-
pair she hadn’t quite lost her
instinct for self-preservation,
the unthinking urge to make
one last try. And it would be
the last one.

3 6

Others like Walt might
have called at 179 Buckwash
Street and left their ad-
dresses. If everything went,
right, if she found the right
one that night, she still
wouldn’t be finished. She had
to find reason to hope again
within the next few hours.
Failing that, she wouldn’t
wait for lingering physical
death.

She dragged herself to her
feet, went into the bedroom
and changed into the first
street dress she could find.
Too tired to switch off the
lights, she left them burning
as she went out.

“You ill, lady?” the cab-
bie asked her.

“Just tired,” she said.

THE cab didn’t leave until
she had climbed the steps
at Buckwash Street. The taxi
driver wasn’t sure he should
leave her.

It was still only nine-thirty.
Nobody would be in bed yet.

“Callers?” Mrs. Decker
said. “There was that young
man I sent down to the base-
ment a day or two ago. Did
you see him?”

“Yes, I did,” said Vee, and
she dragged herself upstairs.
There was plenty of stuff in
her apartment which would
do. What would kill a human
would kill Vee too.

There wouldn’t be any up-
roar afterwards. Even a
real thorough post-mortem
wouldn’t be likely to show

j. t. McIntosh

anything strange about the
mortal remains of Vee Brown.
And young women were often
found dead in their lonely
apartments.

Suddenly she was being
supported. “What’s the mat-
ter, Miss Brown?” she was
asked.

It was Billy Clark, anxious,
concerned.

“I’m tired,” she said, “ter-
ribly tired.”

He helped her to her room,
opened the door for her, sup-
ported her to the solitary
armchair. His eyes expressed
his worry. They were friendly
eyes.

She managed to smile. “I’ll
be all right, Mr. Clark,” she
said. “I’ve been on my feet too
long, that’s all.”

He squared his shoulders.
“Miss Brown,” he said, “I’ve
been trying to talk to you
since you came. You don’t
know many people in town,
do you?”

“I don’t know anybody,”
she said bleakly.

“You know me,” he said.
“I was wondering ... if may-
be you’d like to see a show
sometime, or something?”

“See a show?” she repeated
quizzically.

“Well, I thought you might
not have anybody special,” he
said defensively. “And I’m not
so dumb once I get to know
people. You won’t know about
this, being the kind of girl you
are, but I get so nervous try-
ing to speak to a girl that I

UN A BODY

usually walk right on past
her. Isn’t that silly?”

“No,” said Vee.

“The trouble is, if you’re
shy you get hurt, and then
the next time you’re still more
shy, more afraid of being
hurt. So that’s why I wanted
to ask you first — is there any-
body? I mean ...”

“Nobody,” said Vee. “No-
body at all.”

“Then maybe . . .”

“Billy,” said Vee quietly,
“I’d never hurt you.”

UNDERSTANDING dawn-
ed in his face. “You’ve been
hurt too. You’re like me. Vee,
I knew it somehow. I knew
somehow that though you
looked like a girl with the
world at her feet, you needed
somebody just like I do. Vee,
you and I could . . .”

Afraid of rebuff for going
too far, he stopped abruptly,
coloring.

This was the way they did
it. They hurt each other some-
times, for there was never
any guarantee that what one
would feel, the other would
feel. But this was how it hap-
pened— not by bargains, not
by reason, not by hard logic.

“It’s a fine night,” said Vee
softly. “How about us going
out for a walk?”

He was delighted. “But . . .
surely you’re too tired?”

Vee jumped to her feet.
“Suddenly, Billy,” she said,
“I’m not tired any more.”

END

37

By ROBERT BLOCH

Illustrated by FRANCIS

Life’s but a walking shadow

— says the Bard — but this

Player was heard forever!

IT is perhaps a pity that
nothing is known of An-
drew Benson’s parents.

The same reasons which
prompted them to leave him
as a foundling on the steps of
the St. Andrews Orphanage
also caused them to maintain
a discreet anonymity. The
event occurred on the morn-
ing of March 3rd, 1943 — the
war era, as you probably re-
call— so, in a way, the child
may be regarded as a wartime
casualty. Similar occurrences

38

were by no means rare during
those days, even in Pasadena,
where the Orphanage was
located.

After the usual tentative
and fruitless inquiries, the
good sisters took him in. It was
there that he acquired his first
name, from the patron and
patronymic saint of the estab-
lishment. The “Benson” was
added some years later, by the
couple who eventually adopted
him.

It is difficult, at this late

date, to determine what sort
of a child Andrew was. Or-
phanage records are sketchy,
at best, and Sister Rosemarie,
who acted as supervisor of the
boys’ dormitory, is long since
dead. Sister Albertine, the
primary grades teacher of the
Orphanage School, is now — to
put it as delicately as possible
— in her senility, and her tes-
timony is necessarily colored
by knowledge of subsequent
events.

That Andrew never learned
to talk until he was almost
seven years old seems almost
incredible. The forced gregari-
ousness and the conspicuous
lack of individual attention
characteristic of orphanage
upbringing would make it ap-
pear as though the ability to
speak is necessary for actual
survival in such an environ-
ment. Scarcely more credible
is Sister Albertine’s theory
that Andrew knew how to talk
but merely refused to do so.

For what it is worth, she
remembers him as an unusual-
ly precocious youngster, who
appeared to posssess an intel-
ligence and understanding far
beyond his years. Instead of
employing speech, however, he
relied on pantomime, an art at
which he was so brilliantly
adept (if Sister Albertine is
to be believed) that his mute-
ness was hardly noticed.

“He could imitate anybody,”
she declares. “The other chil-
dren, the Sisters, even the
Mother Superior. Of course I

had to punish him for that.
But it was remarkable, the
way he was able to pick up
all the little mannerisms and
facial expressions of another
person, just at a glance. And
that’s all it took for Andrew.
Just a glance.

“Visitor’s Day was Sunday.
Naturally, Andrew never had
any visitors, but he liked to
hang around the corridor and
watch them come in. And aft-
erwards, in the dormitory at
night, he’d put on a regular
performance for the other
boys. He could impersonate
every single man, woman or
child who’d come to the Or-
phanage that day — the way
they walked, the way they
moved, every action and ges-
ture. Even though he never
said a word, nobody made the
mistake of thinking Andrew
was mentally deficient. For a
while, Dr. Clement had the
idea he might be a mute.”

DR. Roger Clement is one
of the few persons who
might be able to furnish more
objective data concerning
Andrew Benson’s early years.
Unfortunately, he passed
away in 1954 ; victim of a fire
which also destroyed his home
and his office files.

It was Dr. Clement who at-
tended Andrew on the night
that he saw his first motion
picture.

The date was 1949, some
Saturday evening in the late
fall of the year. The Orphan-

39

ROBERT BLOCH

age received and showed one
film a week, and only children
of school age were permitted
to attend. Andrew’s inability
— or unwillingness — to speak
had caused some difficulty
when he entered primary
grades that September, and
several months went by before
he was allowed to join his
classmates in the auditorium
for the Saturday night screen-
ings. But it is known that he
eventually did so.

The picture was the last
(and probably the least) of
the Marx Brothers movies. Its
title was Love Happy, and if
it is remembered by the gen-
eral public at all today, that
is due to the fact that the film
contained a brief walk-on ap-
pearance by a then-unknown
blonde bit player named Mari-
lyn Monroe.

But the Orphanage audi-
ence had other reasons for
regarding it as memorable, for
Love Happy was the picture
that sent Andrew Benson into
his trance.

Long after the lights came
up again in the auditorium,
the child sat there, immobile,
his eyes staring glassily at the
blank screen. When his com-
panions noticed and sought to
arouse him he did not respond.
One of the Sisters (possibly
Sister Rosemarie) shook him.
He promptly collapsed in a
dead faint. Dr. Clement was
summoned, and he adminis-
tered to the patient. Andrew
Benson did not recover con-

sciousness until the following
morning.

And it was then that he
talked.

He talked immediately, he
talked perfectly, he talked flu-
ently— but he did not talk in
the manner of a six-year-old
child. The voice that issued
from his lips was that of a
middle-aged man. It was a
nasal, rasping voice, and even
without the accompanying
grimaces and facial expres-
sions it was instantly and un-
mistakably recognizable as the
voice of Groucho Marx.

Andrew Benson mimicked
Groucho in his Sam Grunion
role to perfection, word for
word. Then he “did” Chico
Marx. After that he relapsed
into silence again. For a mo-
ment it was thought he had re-
verted to his mute phase. But
it was an eloquent silence, and
soon it was understood. He
was imitating Harpo. In rapid
succession, Andrew created
recognizable vocal and visual
portraits of Raymond Burr,
Melville Cooper, Eric Blore
and the other actors who play-
ed small roles in the picture.
His impersonations seemed
uncanny to his companions.
Even the Sisters were im-
pressed.

“Why, he even looked like
Groucho,” Sister Albertine in-
sists.

IGNORING the question of
how a towheaded moppet
of six can achieve a physical

TALENT

41

resemblance to Groucho Marx
without makeup, it is never-
theless an established fact
that Andrew Benson gained
immediate celebrity as the
official mimic of the Orphan-
age.

From that moment on, he
talked regularly, if not freely.
That is to say, he replied to di-
rect questions. He recited his
lessons in the classroom. He
responded with the outward
forms of politeness required
by Orphanage discipline. But
he was never loquacious, or
even communicative, in the
ordinary sense. The only time
he became spontaneously ar-
ticulate was immediately fol-
lowing the showing of the
weekly movie.

There was no recurrence of
his initial seizure, but each
Saturday night show brought
in its wake a complete dra-
matic recapitulation by the
gifted youngster. During the
fall of ’49 and the winter of
*50, Andrew Benson saw many
movies. There was Sorrowful
Jones, with Bob Hope; Tar-
zan’s Magic Fountain; The
Fighting O’ Flynn; The Life of
Riley; Little Women, and a
number of other films, current
and older. Naturally, these
pictures were subject to ap-
proval by the Sisters before
being shown. Movies empha-
sizing violence were not in-
cluded. Still, several westerns
reached the Orphanage screen,
and it is significant that An-
drew Benson reacted in what

was to become a characteristic
fashion.

“Funny thing,” declares Al-
bert Dominguez, who attend-
ed the Orphanage during the
same period as Andrew Ben-
son and is one of the few per-
sons located who is willing to
admit, let alone discuss, the
fact. “At first Andy imitated
everybody — all the men, that
is. He never imitated none of
the women. But after he start-
ed to see Westerns, it got so
he was choosey, like. He just
imitated the villains. I don’t
mean like when us guys was
playing cowboys — you know,
when one guy is the sheriff
and one is a gun-slinger. I
mean, he imitated villains all
the time. He could talk like
’em, he could even look like
’em. We use to razz hell out
of him, you know?”

It is probably as a result of
the “razzing” that Andrew
Benson, on the evening of May
17th, 1950, attempted to slit
the throat of Frank Phillips
with a table-knife. Still, Al-
bert Dominguez claims that
the older boy offered no prov-
ocation. His view is that An-
drew Benson was exactly du-
plicating the screen role of a
western desperado in an old
Charles Starrett movie.

The incident was hushed up
and no action taken.

We have little information
on Andrew Benson’s growth
and development between the
summer of 1950 and the au-
tumn of 1955. Dominguez left

42

ROBERT BLOCH

the Orphanage, nobody else
appears willing to testify, and
Sister Albertine had retired
to a rest-home. As a result,
there is nothing available con-
cerning what may well have
been Andrew’s crucial, forma-
tive years. The meager rec-
ords of his classwork seem sat-
isfactory enough, and there is
nothing to indicate that he
was a disciplinary problem to
his instructors. In June of
1955 he was photographed
with the rest of his classmates
upon the occasion of gradua-
tion from Eighth Grade.

His face is a mere blur, an
almost blank smudge in a
sea of pre-adolescent counte-
nances. What he actually look-
ed like at that age is hard to
tell.

The Bensons thought that
he resembled their son, David.

LITTLE David Benson had
died of polio in 1953. Two
years later his parents came
to St. Andrews Orphanage
seeking to adopt a boy. They
had David’s picture with
them. They were frank to
state that they sought a physi-
cal resemblance as a guide to
making their choice.

Did Andrew Benson see
that photograph? Did — as has
been subsequently theorized
by certain irresponsible alarm-
ists— he see certain home
movies which the Bensons had
taken of their child?

We must confine ourselves
to the known facts ; which are,

talb-it

simply, that Mr. and Mrs.
Louis Benson, of Pasadena,
California, legally adopted An-
drew Benson, aged 12, on De-
cember 9th, 1955.

Andrew Benson went to live
in their home, as their son. He
entered the public high school.
He became the owner of a bi-
cycle. He received an allow-
ance of one dollar a week. And
he went to the movies.

Andrew Benson went to the
movies, and there were no re-
strictions at all. For several
months, that is. During this
period he saw comedies, dra-
mas, westerns, musicals, melo-
dramas. He must have seen
melodramas. Was there a film,
released early in 1956, in
which an actor played the role
of a gangster who pushed a
victim out of a second-story
window?

Knowing what we do today,
we must suspect that there
must have been. But at the
time, when the actual incident
occurred, Andrew Benson was
exonerated. He and the other
boy had been “scuffling” in a
classroom after school, and
the boy had “accidentally fall-
en.” At least, this is the official
version of the affair. The boy
— now Pvt. Raymond Schuy-
ler, USMC — maintains to this
day that Benson deliberately
tried to kill him.

“He was spooky, that kid,”
Schuyler insists. “None of us
ever really got close to him. It
was like there was nothing to
get close to, you know? I

43

mean, he kept changing off.
From one day to the next you
could never figure out what he
was going to be like. Of
course, we all knew he imitat-
ed these movie actors. He was
only a freshman but already
he was a big shot in the dra-
matic club. But he imitated all
the time. One minute he’d be
real quiet, and the next,
wham! You know that story,
the one about Jekyll and
Hyde ? Well, that was Andrew
Benson. Afternoon he grab-
bed me, we weren’t even talk-
ing to each other. He just
came up to me at the window
and I swear to God he changed
right before my eyes. It was
as if he all of a sudden got
about a foot taller and fifty
pounds heavier, and his face
was real wild. He pushed me
out of the window, without
one word. Of course, I was
scared spitless, and maybe I
just thought he changed. I
mean, nobody can actually do
a thing like that, can they ?”
This question, if it arose at
all at the time, remained un-
answered. We do know that
Andrew Benson was brought
to the attention of Dr. Hans
Fahringer, child psychiatrist
and part-time guidance coun-
selor at the school, and that
his initial examination dis-
closed no apparent abnormali-
ties of personality or behav-
ior-patterns. Dr. Fahringer
did, however, have several
long talks with the Bensons.
As a result Andrew was for-

bidden to attend motion pic-
tures. The following year Dr.
Fahringer voluntarily offered
to examine young Andrew.
Undoubtedly his interest had
been aroused by the amazing
dramatic abilities the boy was
showing in his extra-curricu-
lar activities at the school.

ONLY one such interview
ever took place, and it is
to be regretted that Dr. Fah-
ringer neither committed his
findings to paper nor commu-
nicated them to the Bensons
before his sudden, shocking
death at the hands of an un-
known assailant. It is believed
(or was believed by the police,
at the time) that one of his
former patients, committed to
an institution as a psychotic
and subsequently escaped, may
have been guilty of the crime.

All that we know is that it
occurred some short while fol-
lowing a local re-run of Man
in the Attic. In this film Jack
Palance essayed the role of
Jack the Ripper.

It is interesting, today, to
examine some of the so-called
“horror movies’’ of those
years, including the re-runs
of earlier vehicles starring
Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi,
Peter Lorre and a number of
other actors.

We cannot say with any
certainty, of course, that An-
drew Benson was violating the
wishes of his foster-parents
and secretly attending motion
pictures. But if he did, it is

44

ROBERT BLOCH

quite likely that he would fre-
quent the smaller neighbor-
hood houses, many of which
specialized in re-runs. And we
do know, from the remarks of
fellow-classmates during those
high-school years, that “Andy”
was familiar — almost omnis-
ciently so — with the manner-
isms of these performers.

The evidence is often con-
flicting. Joan Charters, for
example, is willing to “swear
on a stack of Bibles” that An-
drew Benson, at the age of 15,
was “a dead ringer for Peter
Lorre — the same bug eyes and
everything.” Whereas Nick
Dossinger, who attended class-
es with Benson a year later,
insists that he “looked just
like Boris Karloff.”

Granted that adolescence
may bring about a consider-
able increase in height during
the period of a year, it is
nevertheless difficult to imag-
ine how a “dead ringer for
Peter Lorre” could meta-
morphize into an asthenic
Karloff type.

A mass of testimony is
available concerning Andrew
Benson during those years,
but almost all of it deals with
his phenomenal histrionic tal-
ent and his startling skill at
“ad lib” impersonation of mo-
tion picture actors. Apparent-
ly he had given up mimicking
his associates and contempo-
raries almost entirely.

“He said he liked to do ac-
tors better, because they were
bigger,” said Don Brady, who

TALENT

appeared with him in the Sen-
ior Play. “I asked him what he
meant by ‘bigger’ and he said
it was just that. Actors were
bigger on the screen. Some-
times they were twenty feet
tall. He said, ‘Why bother with
little people when you can be
big?’ He was a real offbeat
character, that one.”

The phrases recur. “Odd-
ball.” “Screwball.” “Real
gone.” They are picturesque,
but hardly enlightening. And
there seems to be little recol-
lection of Andrew Benson as a
friend or classmate, in the or-
dinary roles of adolescence.
It’s the imitator who is re-
membered, with admiration
and, frequently, with distaste
bordering on actual apprehen-
sion.

“He was so good he scared
you. But that’s when he was
doing those impersonations, of
course. The rest of the time,
you scarcely knew he was
around.”

“Classes? I guess he did all
right. I didn’t notice him
much.”

“Andrew was a fair stu-
dent. He could recite when
called upon, but he never vol-
unteered. His marks were
average. I got the impression
he was rather withdrawn.”
“No, he never dated much.
Come to think of it, I don’t
think he went out with girls
at all. I never paid much at-
tention to him, except when
he was on stage, of course.”

“I wasn’t really what you

45

call close to Andy. I don’t
know anybody who seemed
to be friends with him. He
was so quiet, outside of the
dramatics. And when he got
up there, it was like he was a
different person. He was real
great, you know? We all fig-
ured he’d end up at the Pasa-
dena Playhouse.”

THE reminiscences of his
contemporaries are fre-
quently apt to touch upon mat-
ters which did not directly in-
volve Andrew Benson. The
years 1956 and 1957 are still
remembered, by high school
students of the area in partic-
ular, as the years of the cur-
few. It was a voluntary cur-
few, of course, but it was
nevertheless strictly observed
by most of the female students
during the period of the
“werewolf murders” — that se-
ries of savage, still-unsolved
crimes which terrorized the
community for well over a
year. Certain cannibalistic as-
pects of the slaying of the five
young women led to the
“werewolf” appellation on the
part of the sensation-monger-
ing press. The Wolf Man se-
ries made by Universal had
been revived, and perhaps this
had something to do with the
association.

But to return to Andrew
Benson: he grew up, went to
school, and lived the normal
life of a dutiful step-son. If
his foster-parents were a bit
strict, he made no complaints.

46

If they punished him because
they suspected he sometimes
slipped out of his room at
night, he made no complaints
or denials. If they seemed ap-
prehensive lest he be disobey-
ing their set injunctions not
to attend the movies, he offer-
ed no overt defiance.

The only known clash be-
tween Andrew Benson and his
family came about as a result
of their flat refusal to allow a
television set in their home.
Whether or not they were con-
cerned about the possible
encouragement of Andrew’s
mimicry or whether they had
merely developed an allergy
to Lawrence Welk is difficult
to determine. Nevertheless,
they balked at the acquisition
of a TV receiver. Andrew beg-
ged and pleaded, pointing out
that he “needed” television as
an aid to a future dramatic
career. His argument had
some justification for, in his
senior year, Andrew had in-
deed been “scouted” by the
famous Pasadena Playhouse,
and there was even some talk
of a future professional career
without the necessity of form-
al training.

But the Bensons were ada-
mant on the television ques-
tion; they remained adamant
right up to the day of their
death.

This unfortunate circum-
stance occurred at Balboa,
where the Bensons owned a
small cottage and maintained
a little cabin-cruiser. The

ROBERT BLOCH

elder Bensons and Andrew
were heading for Catalina
Channel when it overturned
in choppy waters. Andrew
managed to cling to the craft
until rescued, but his foster-
parents were gone. It was a
common enough accident ;
you’ve probably seen some-
thing just like it in the movies
a dozen times.

Andrew, just turned eight-
teen, was left an orphan once
more — but an orphan in full
possession of a lovely home,
and with the expectation of
coming into a sizable inherit-
ance when he reached twenty-
one. The Benson estate was
administered by the family at-
torney, Justin L. Fowler, and
he placed young Andrew on an
allowance of forty dollars a
week — an amount sufficient
for a recent graduate of high
school to survive on, but hard-
ly enough to maintain him in
luxury.

IT is to be feared that violent
scenes were precipitated
between the young man and
his attorney. There is no point
in recapitulating them here,
or in condemning Fowler for
what may seem — on the sur-
face— to be the development
of a fixation.

But up until the night that
he was struck down by a hit-
and-run driver in the street
before his house, Attorney
Fowler seemed almost ob-
sessed with the desire to prove
that the Benson lad was legal-

TALENT

ly incompetent, or worse. In-
deed, it was his investigations
which led to the uncovering of
what few facts are presently
available concerning the life
of Andrew Benson.

Certain other hypotheses —
one hesitates to dignify them
with the term, “conclusions”
— he apparently extrapolated
from these meager findings,
or fabricated out of thin air.
Unless, of course, he did man-
age to discover details which
he never actually disclosed.
Without the support of such
details there is no way of
authenticating what seem to
be fantastic conjectures.

A random sampling, as re-
membered from various con-
versations Fowler had with
the authorities, will suffice.

“I don’t think the kid is
even human, for that matter.
Just because he showed up on
those orphanage steps, you
call him a foundling. Change-
ling might be a better word
for it. Yes, I know they don’t
believe in such things any
more. And if you talk about
life-forms from other planets,
they laugh at you and tell you
to join the Fortean Society.
So happens I’m a member in
good standing.

“Changeling? It’s probably
a more accurate term than the
narrow meaning implies. I’m
talking about the way he
changes when he sees these
movies. No, don’t take my
word for it— -ask anyone who’s
ever seen him act. Better still,

47

ask those who never saw him
on a stage, but just watched
him imitate movie perform-
ers in private. You’ll find out
he did a lot more than just
imitate. He became the actor.
Yes, I mean he underwent
an actual physical transforma-
tion. Chameleon. Or some
other form of life. Who can
say?

“No, I don’t pretend to
understand it. I know it’s not
'scientific’ according to the
way you define science. But
that doesn’t mean it’s impos-
sible. There are a lot of life-
forms in the universe, and we
can only guess at some of
them. Why shouldn’t there be
one that’s abnormally sensi-
tive to mimicry?

“You know what effect the
movies can have on so-called
‘normal’ human beings, under
certain conditions. It’s a hyp-
notic state, this movie-view-
ing, and you can ask the psy-
chologists for confirmation.
Darkness, concentration, sug-
gestion— all the elements are
present. And there’s post-
hypnotic suggestion, too.
Again, psychiatrists will back
me up on that. Most people
tend to identify with various
characters on the screen.
That's where our hero-wor-
ship comes in, that’s why we
have western-movie fans, and
detective fans, and all the rest.
Supposedly ordinary people
come out of the theatre and
fantasy themselves as the
heroes and heroines they saw

48

up there on the screen; imi-
tate them, too.

“That’s what Andrew Ben-
son did, of course. Only sup-
pose he could carry it one
step further? Suppose he
was capable of being what he
saw portrayed? And he chose
to be the villains? I tell you,
it’s time to investigate those
killings of a few years back,
all of them. Not just the mur-
der of those girls, but the
murder of the two doctors who
examined Benson when he was
a child, and the death of his
foster-parents, too. I don’t
think any of these things were
accidents. I think some people
got too close to the secret, and
Benson put them out of the
way.

“Why? How should I know
why? Any more than I know
what he’s looking for when he
watches the movies. But he’s
looking for something, I can
guarantee that. Who knows
what purpose such a life-form
can have, or what he intends
to do with his power? All I
can do is warn you.”

IT IS easy to dismiss At-
torney Fowler as a para-
noid type, though perhaps it
is unfair, in that we cannot
evaluate the reasons for his
outburst. That he knew (or
believed he knew) something
is self-evident. As a matter
of fact, on the very evening of
his death he was apparently
about to set down his findings
on paper.

ROBERT BLOCH

Deplorably, all that he ever
set down was a preamble.
It is a quotation from Eric
Voegelin, concerning rigid
pragmatic attitudes of “sci-
entism”, so-called:

“The assumption (1) that
the mathematized science of
natural phenomena is a model
science to which all other sci-
ences ought to conform; (2)
that all realms of being are
accessible to the methods of
sciences of phenomena ; and
(3) that all reality which is
not accessible to sciences of
phenomena is either irreve-
lant or, in the more radical
form of the dogma, illusion-
ary.”

But Attorney Fowler is
dead, and we must deal with
the living.

With Max Schick, for ex-
ample. He is the motion pic-
ture and television agent who
visited Andrew Benson at his
home shortly after the death
of the elder Bensons, and of-
fered him an immediate con-
tract.

“You’re a natural,” Schick
declared. “Never mind with
the Pasadena Playhouse bit. I
can spot you right now, be-
lieve me! With what you got,
we’ll back Brando right off the
map ! Of course, we gotta start
small, but I know just the
gimmick. Main thing is to
establish you in a starring
slot right away. None of this
stock-contract jazz, get me?
The studios aren’t handing
’em out in the first place, and

TALENT

even if you landed one, you'd
end up on Cloud Nowhere.
No, the deal is to get you a
lead and billing right off the
bat. And like I said, I got the
angle.

“We go to a small indie
producer, get it? Must be a
dozen of ’em operating right
now, and all of ’em making
the same thing. Only one kind
of picture that combines low
budgets with big grosses, and
that’s a science fiction movie.
You’ve seen them.

“Yeah, you heard me, a
science fiction movie. Whad-
dya mean, you never saw one?
Are you kidding? How about
that? You mean you never
saw any science fiction pic-
tures at all ?

“Oh, your folks, eh? Had
to sneak out? And they only
show that kind of stuff at the
downtown houses?

“Well look, kid, it’s about
time, that’s all I can say. It's
about time ! Hey, just so’s you
know what we’re talking
about, you better get on the
ball and take in one right
away.

“Sure, I’m positive, there
must be one playing a down-
town first run now. Why don’t
you go this afternoon? I got
some work to finish up here
at the office — run you down
in my car, you can go on to
the show, meet me back there
when you get out.

“Sure, you can take the car
after you drop me off. Be my

SO Andrew Benson saw his
first science fiction movie.
He drove there and back in
Max Schick’s car. Coinciden-
tally enough, it was the late
afternoon of the day when
Attorney Fowler became a
hit-and-run victim. Schick has
good reason to remember
Andrew Benson’s reappear-
ance at his office just after
dusk.

“He had a look on his face
that was out of this world,”
Schick says.

“ ‘How’d you like the pic-
ture?’ I ask him.”

“ ‘It was wonderful,’ he
tells me. ‘Just what I’ve been
looking for all these years.
And to think I didn’t know.’
“ ‘Didn’t know what?’ I ask.
But he isn’t talking to me any
more. You can see that. He’s
talking to himself.”

“ ‘I thought there must be
something like that,’ he says.
‘Something better than Drac-
ula, or Frankenstein’s mon-
ster, or all the rest. Something
bigger, more powerful. Some-
thing I could really be. And
now I know. And now I’m go-
ing to.’ ”

Max Schick is unable to
maintain coherency from this
point on. But his direct ac-
count is not necessary. We
are, unfortunately, all too well
aware of what happened next.

Max Schick sat there in his
chair and watched Andrew
Benson change.

He watched him grow. He
watched him put forth the
eyes, the stalks, the writhing
tentacles. He watched him
twist and tower, filling the
room and then overflowing
until the flimsy stucco walls
collapsed and there was noth-
ing but the green, gigantic
horror, the sixty-foot-high
monstrosity that may have
been born in a screenwriter’s
brain or have been spawned
beyond the stars, but certain-
ly existed and drew nourish-
ment from realms far from a
three-dimensional world or
three-dimensional concepts of
sanity.

Max Schick will never for-
get that night and neither, of
course, will anybody else.

That was the night the mon-
ster destroyed Los Angeles.

END

In The Next Issue . . .

KANGAROO COURT

A Short Novel by Daniel F. Galouye

Blake’s future was dark. He had murdered his friend— his life
was forfeit— and now he had to break the news to the corpse!

50

ROBERT BLOCH

MC (302) GERMANIUM RADIO

ILLUSTRATION ACTUAL SIZE
NO BATTERIES NEEDED
WEIGHS 1 Vz OUNCES |
READY TO PLAY

SIMPLE TUNING
HI-FI TONE

POSTPAID

$3 00 1 1

This perfect radio, a marvel of modern
science, is unconditionally guaranteed

Reception range

Stations Output

100 KW
50 KW
10 KW

Distance

50 Miles
38 Miles
20 Miles

Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, etc'

If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not \
entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees^*
you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this \
guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine.

BARMARAY CORP. Box 122, Village Station, New York 14, N. Y.

Enclosed find Please send _ Radios postpaid

($3 per radio)

Name ..
Address
City

State

The whereabouts of a
hideaway can be found
— but what about the

whenabouts?

SYLVIA JACOBS Illustrated by RITTER

ms

SLICK Tennant had a
hunch. The sixth sense that
had made him king of the lo-
cal rackets, that had warned
him in time when three of his
men fell to the machine guns
of a rival gang, now told him
that the Feds were after him,
that they had evidence to send
him up for a long stretch. But
he was going where even the
Feds couldn’t extradite him.

Slick Tennant was going to
hide in the future.

They didn’t call him Slick
for nothing. For months, a
private dick in his pay had
shadowed Dr. Richard Porter,
inventor of a device called by
reporters a time-travel ma-
chine, by comedians a crystal
ball, and by Dr. Porter’s fel-
low-psychiatrists a Meta-
chronoscope. Slick knew the

52

doctor was a widower, knew Strolling along the street,
where he lived, knew pressure Slick might have been any
could be put upon him citizen on his way home. A
through Dickie Porter, aged hat shadowed his features as
seven. In Slick’s pocket was a he passed under the street
house-key Dr. Porter thought lights, and he carried a brief -
he had lost two weeks ago. case. He hailed a cruising cab
But Slick hadn’t disclosed and proceeded to a spot two
his intentions to anyone. The blocks from the Porter home,
chauffeur of his bullet-proof being careful not to tip too
j car let him out several miles much or too little to attract
from the Porter residence, the driver’s attention.

53

Dr. Porter propped an elbow
on his pillow, trying to orient
himself in the fuzziness that
follows a midnight awaken-
ing. He stifled a gasp, and sat
up suddenly, as he saw that
the man silhouetted against
the living room lamp had pa-
jama-clad Dickie by the arm.
The child was rubbing his
eyes, but there wasn’t a whim-
per out of him.

“I got a gun on the kid,”
the man said. “I like kids
and I won’t hurt him if you
do what I say.”

The doctor struggled to
keep his voice soothing and
professional. “Of course you
wouldn’t,” he said. “You don’t
want to go back to the hos-
pital.”

The man laughed. “I ain’t
one of your nuts, Doc. And
I don’t want your money. I
got plenty. All I want from
you is a little trip in your
time machine.”

“Metachronoscope,” correct-
ed the doctor. “It’s very mis-
leading to call it a time-travel
machine.”

Letting go of the boy,
Slick dealt Dr. Porter a
vicious slap. “That’ll learn you
not to pull none of your high-
brow stuff. Is it my fault I
had to quit school to keep the
family from starvin’ when my
old man got sent up? If Slick
Tennant says it’s a time-trav-
el machine, that’s what you
call it, see?”

“Yes, I see,” Dr. Porter

54

said faintly. The mention of
gangland’s most dreaded name
had more effect on him than
the blow.

“Now let’s get something
else straight. Once, on TV,
they said a couple of guys
came back. Another time, the
news program said they could-
n’t come back and give tips
on the ponies. Which is right?
Can you bring me back any
time you want to?”

“Absolutely not. The de-
cision is irrevocable. The pub-
lic’s impression that the
future can be altered or pre-
dicted is incorrect.”

“Fine. I don’t want to come
back. And I don’t need to
change the future, neither.
Things may be different, but
a smart cookie can always get
along. Now, according to the
news, you only sent these guys
ahead a year. That ain’t
enough. What’s the most you
could send me ahead?”

“Theoretically, we could
send a subject ahead as much
as twenty years, if we could
find anyone who would con-
sent to that, and undoubtedly
we could learn a great deal
more by so doing.”

“But you did find out that
the boys come through okay?”
“Yes. We sent these two
men ahead in 1961. When they
returned to awareness, it was
1962. Physically and mentally
they were as fit as before.”
“Did they know what hap-
pened to them?”

“Well, the year had no ap-

SYLVIA JACOBS

parent duration for them, but
they had normal speed mem-
ories of the intervening year
when they returned to aware-
ness. Evidently their fore-
memories for the entire year
must have been condensed
into the brief period they
were in the field. From this
phenomenon, we derive the
term ‘sending the subjects
ahead’ which has so often
been misinterpreted. But it’s
important to note that these
condensed fore-memories were
not available until twenty-
four to forty-eight hours after
the events, which means the
future cannot be effectively
predicted by present tech-
niques.”

That sounded like plain
English; it sounded as if it
meant something, but Slick
wasn’t quite sure what. He
seized on the last remark,
which he understood.

“What did you build this
gadget for, if you can’t tell
fortunes with it?” he asked.

“The layman thinks in
terms of immediate practical
application. But our primary
objective was knowledge of
the human mind. We con-
firmed the existence of men-
tal capacities that have been
suspected for centuries. We
formulated the axiom that
awareness is a function of
subconscious fore-memories
becoming currently available.
We experimentally suspended
awareness without inducing
unconsciousness, by causing

56

the fore-memories to con-
dense. I hope the process will
develop into a useful tool for
my profession, that we learn
how to superimpose condition-
ing on the blank area to
produce rational, socially ac-
ceptable action, rather than
the literal and irrational com-
pulsion which is a drawback
to implanting post-hypnotic
commands. But I can’t tell you
at this point where our re-
search will lead.”

THIS double-talk had Slick
going around in circles.
But he had a strong hunch
that taking a trip in the ma-
chine was the right thing to
do, and he wasn’t going to let
Porter divert him from that.

“Let’s get down to cases,
Doc. Just exactly what’s go-
ing to happen to me when I
get in this machine?”

“It’s difficult to explain the
process in lay terms, particu-
larly under stress. But this
may help you to understand
it. Have you ever had the ex-
perience of going back to
sleep for a few moments after
you awoke in the morning,
and dreaming a long, involved
dream?”

“Sure. I get some good
hunches that way.”

“Then you know the dream
may cover a period of hours,
days, or even years. People
in the dream move and speak
at a normal speed. Yet when
you awaken again and look at
the clock, you see that only

SYLVIA JACOBS

a few minutes or even sec-
onds have elapsed. A motion
picture of the events in the
dream would be nothing but
a gabble and a blur, if pro-
jected at such terriffic speed.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I had
that happen plenty of times,
and I always thought it was
kind of funny.”

“It demonstrates the capac-
ity of the human mind to
function independently of the
limitations of chronological
time. And premonitory expe-
riences— what you call hunch-
es— give us an inkling of the
fore-memory phenomenon. In
our dreams, the past, future,
literal and symbolical material
mingles. But by subjecting the
physical brain to a certain
type of electro-magnetic field,
we can isolate the fore-mem-
ories, condensed as in the
dream, while the subject acts
as if in a waking state.”
“Does it hurt when a guy’s
brain goes into this field?”
“Not at all. Awareness and
physical sensations are totally
suspended. The elapsing time
has no apparent duration.
That means you can’t feel any-
thing at all, you don’t know
what has happened until later,
and twenty hours or even
twenty years pass in a second,
as far as your mind is con-
cerned.”

“Why in the hell didn’t you
give me that straight, instead
of dragging in all this dream
business? That’s just what
I’m looking for, just what I

TIME PAYMENT

figured it would be from the
news stories. Do you throw
this here field ahead or does
the time machine travel along
with the guy inside?”

Dr. Porter sighed slightly.
The man had a preconceived
idea, and nothing Porter had
said had altered it in the
slightest. “The machine does-
n’t actually travel,” he ex-
plained patiently. “That’s why
I objected to calling it a time-
travel machine. It exists here
and now and it will exist in
the future, I suppose.”

“You mean it’ll be there
when I come out of the field?”

“I said I suppose so. Why
should that concern you, par-
ticularly?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Slick
Tennant pays off two ways.
Maybe you only heard about
the times he paid off guys for
crossing him, but he pays off
guys that help him, too. I'm
paying for your help by giving
you a chance to save your skin.
I got a hand grenade in this
briefcase. When I get through
with that machine, I’m going
to blow her to little, bitty
pieces. Maybe you can’t bring
me back, but I don’t want you
to have the machine to send
the cops after me, neither. By
the time you get a new ma-
chine built, my trail will be
cold.”

Intellectually, Dr. Porter
accepted the concept of the in-
evitability of events. If Slick
was going to blow up the ma-
chine, he was going to blow

57

it up. Still the old, old human
habit of trying to control the
future kept obstinately insin-
uating itself.

“But you don’t need to de-
stroy the machine,” he pro-
tested. “Look, let me try to
explain — ”

“I thought you’d try to talk
me out of it,” Slick said omi-
nously. “I know that a lot of
money and work went into
that gadget, but I got to blow
her up. You should be glad
you’re not on my list or you’d
get blown up with her. And I
got no time for any more
talkin’. I found out all I want
to know. Now, get up and get
dressed, and make it snappy.
You’re going to drive me over
to the University.”

Porter had been careful not
to make any moves that might
alarm his unbidden guest; he
swung his feet obediently over
the side of the bed. “Is Dickie
going with us?” he asked.

“You’re damned right he is.
I don’t want you high-signing
any cops on the way, and the
kid might even be sharp
enough to phone the station
himself, if we left him here.”
He didn’t add that he had an
even better reason for taking
the boy.

“Then let him get some
clothes on too. It’s cold out-
side.” To his son. Dr. Porter
added, “Don’t be afraid,
Dickie. Everything is going to
be all right.”

“Sure, Daddy,” the boy said
sturdily. “You just do like he

58

says. He’s like the bad guys on
TV.”

“You got a smart kid. Por-
ter,” Slick said, grinning.
“Knows when to keep his trap
shut and what to say when he
opens it. That’s more than
some of the hoods in this town
know.”

DRIVING down the freeway
toward the University
campus, Slick and the boy sat
in the back seat of Dr. Por-
ter’s car. Slick tried the kid on
his lap for size ; it was a nice
fit. The papers said the time
machine was a two-passenger
job, but if that wasn’t the
straight dope, Slick could hold
the kid on his lap, like this.

The gangster squeezed
Dickie’s small hand. “You’re
all right, boy. Plenty of guys
a lot bigger than you would be
bawlin’ if Slick Tennant in-
vited them to take a little ride.
If I ever have a kid of my own
I’d want one just like you.”
He tucked a bill in the pocket
of Dickie’s jacket. “This is to
buy you a play gat or some-
thing.”

“Thank you, Mr. Slick,” the
boy said gravely.

Though business compelled
him to do things like rubbing
out the competition, Slick was
really soft-hearted. Some of
the proceeds of his illicit activ-
ities were devoted each year
to buying Christmas trees,
turkeys, and toys for poor
children. He kind of hated to
separate Dickie Porter from

SYLVIA JACOBS

his father, but it was the oiriy
way he could see to insure a
safe passage through time.

And then, Slick reflected, he
would have a kid of his own,
or at least one he was respon-
sible for. Slick decided then
and there that he would send
the boy to the fanciest high-
class boarding school they had
in the future, the kind the
millionaire kids went to.
Dickie would have a pony, a
bike, a dog, plenty of fried
chicken and strawberry short-
cake, all the things Slick had
yearned for in his own slum
childhood. He would live in the
country, where there were
miles of fresh green grass to
play on, and he would wear a
silver-studded cowboy suit
with real spurs. Unless the
kids where they were going
would be wearing space-pilot
suits instead. By gosh, that
would be something. Maybe
Slick could take the kid on a
luxury cruise to the Moon.

To provide these things,
Slick would have to follow the
only trade he knew, move in
on the local mobs. But he
wouldn’t let Dickie mix with
hoods and racketeers. Dickie
would study to be something
respectable, a mouthpiece or
maybe a doctor like his old
man. Dickie would have all the
advantages a kid could ask for
— everything except a real
father.

He might even have that,
come to think of it. Dr. Porter
might easily live another

TIME PAYMENT

twenty years, now that Slick
had warned him to get away
from the machine before it
was blown up. First, Slick
would get some plastic sur-
gery, so Porter and any other
old ducks who were still alive
wouldn’t recognize him. There
ought to be a lot of improve-
ments in plastic surgery in
twenty years. Probably a guy
could even get his fingerprints
changed. Then he would hire,
a private dick to look up
Porter.

Slick pictured the aged fa-
ther being reunited with the'
son he’d lost twenty years be-
fore, seeing the child just as
he’d been at the moment
of parting, with Slick play-
ing Santa Claus in the back-
ground, sending the kid a roll
of thousand-dollar bills with
a pink ribbon around it for a
present. It was such a touch-
ing thought that tears came to
the gangster’s eyes, as they
did when he watched a sad
movie.

He was sorry he couldn’t let
Porter and the boy in on his
plans right now, but he wasn’t
ready to tip his hand.

THE machine was a two-
passenger job, all right.
Slick could tell that the min-
ute he saw it. There was no
enclosure, just two reclining
barber chairs fixed on two cir-
cular plates sunk in a plat-
form. After the switch was
set, Porter had explained, the
additional weight of an occu-

59

pant of the chair would com-
plete the contact and the field
would build up. Slick exam-
ined the control panel, partic-
ularly the dial, which was
calibrated into twenty sec-
tions, each for a ninety-second
exposure to the field.

“You did say twenty years,
didn’t you ?” Dr. Porter asked.

“If that’s the limit,” Slick
replied tersely, “like I heard.”
“How old are you?”

“You mean can my ticker
take it? Well, I’m forty-five.
They tell me I don't look it.”
Slick was vain of his black
hair, without a thread of gray
in it.

“No, you don’t look it. But
let me take your pulse and
blood pressure.”

HE submitted, without let-
ting go of either his gun
or brief case.

“You seem to be in good
shape, as nearly as I can tell
from a superficial examina-
tion. But don’t you want to re-
consider this twenty-year
arrangement? I can’t change
the setting once you’re in the
chair, you know. Are you sure
you understand that the only
thing affected will be your
own subjective experience,
that time will go on just as it
always has, but that you won’t
be aware of anything between
now and twenty years from
now?”

“Sure. You told me that
three-four times already. What
are you trying to do? Stall till

60

help gets here?” Slick asked
suspiciously.

“I’m not stalling,” the doc-
tor said. “In fact, I’m only too
glad to find someone to whom
the present means so little that
he’s willing to go into a
twenty-year blank. But ethics
insist that I warn you.”

He turned the switch to the
twenty-year mark.

“I’m ready,” he said.

“Whaddya mean, warn
me?” Slick snapped. “Is this
thing booby trapped?”

“Certainly not. I have mere-
ly tried to explain that it is
not exactly what you antici-
pated— ”

“You know what I’m drivin’
at. Have you got the machine
set to electrocute me or ex-
plode the grenade? A lot of
you respectable citizens don’t
figure a guy like me is exactly
human. You wouldn’t call it
murder to rub me out. You’d
think you was doin’ the town
a favor.”

“Some people would, per-
haps, but I’m a doctor, not a
judge. I’ve spent my life try-
ing to find out what makes
men like you act as they do,
not in devising means of pun-
ishing them. But even if I
wanted to do you bodily harm,
I couldn’t. The machine has a
built-in safety factor.”

This was where Slick
sprang a little surprise.

“You willing to bet your
kid’s life on that?” he asked,
picking up the boy.

He took two steps toward

SYLVIA JACOBS

the platform, watching Por-
ter’s reactions. If the father
made a lunge toward the
panel, Slick would know the
setting was wrong. But Porter
only stood stunned. The set-
ting was safe, then, but Slick
had only Porter’s word that it
couldn’t be changed after con-
tact. Maybe a change would
be fatal to the passenger. So
he would make sure there
would be no changes.

“I always take out travel in-
surance, Doc,” Slick said, and,
stepping onto the platform, he
put the boy gently into one of
the chairs and reclined in the
pther himself.

“Dickie!” Dr. Porter cried.

It was the last thing Slick
or the boy heard him say.

SLICK came back to aware-
ness of where he was and
what he was doing. He was in
one of the radial corridors,
but at what compass point, at
which level, and how many
miles inside the outer walls of
the city, he didn’t know. He
ran his fingers in a puzzled
manner through his hair. He
had never quite figured out the
lettering system of the “cir-
cles” which weren’t actually
circles, but multagons.

He didn’t even know what
time it was. In this perpetual
mock daylight, there was no
change; there were no varia-
tions of seasons in this ster-
ilized, irradiated, humidified,
filtered, deodorized, oxygen-
ated, constantly circulating

TIME PAYMENT

seventy-five degrees. He re-
membered when streets used
to have names, when you
needed a street guide instead
of a course in geometry to find
your way around the city. He
remembered when a city was
many buildings, not one im-
mense pyramid, when you
wore dark glasses against the
sun’s glare on the pavements,
when a Santa Ana blew dust
over everything or smog
stung your eyes, when people
drove their cars into the
downtown congestion instead
of leaving them on the out-
skirts, when they said to each
other, “There hasn’t been
enough rain this year,” be-
cause there was no weather
control and water for the
lawns came all the way from
the Colorado instead of from
the nearby Pacific.

That was the trouble — his
mind slipped back to the old
days, his memories got out of
sequence, and he wandered
away from Recidivist Gar-
dens, the only place he felt
comfortable and at home. Dr.
Tyson said it was because he
had been in the field so long
that time, twenty years ago.

A young man was staring
at him, and Slick looked down
at himself. No wonder the
young man was staring! To
his shame. Slick saw that he
was wearing some kind of
clothes, and worst of all, he
was wearing them inside the
city ! Where had he found
them? The only possible ex-

61

planation was that he had
drawn them out on his
museum card. These scram-
bled-sequence attacks were
becoming more embarrassing
each time !

“Don’t act so flustered,
Pop,” the young man said.
“Nobody saw you but me.
Take ’em off and I’ll put ’em
in the lost-and-found chute for
you. Or are you on your way
to a costume ball ?”

Slick looked over the railing
of the balcony. There were
several people waiting for ele-
vators and radial cars on the
level below all decently naked,
of course, but the young man
was right. Nobody else had
seen Slick’s shame. Hurriedly,
he stepped out of the uncom-
fortable clothes and rolled
them into a bundle. The young
man took it from him.

“You’re very kind — thank
you so much,” Slick said.

“Think nothing of it,” the
young man said. “What ad-
dress should I put on this
stuff?”

“Just Recidivist Gardens.
They’ll take care of it in the
office. I hope you don’t think
all of us at the Gardens do
peculiar things like this. It’s
just that — well, it’s a long
story, but they didn’t start my
conditioning until I’d been in
the blank five years. I’m not
capable of anything really
anti-social, you understand,
but I get what they call se-
quence scrambles. Sometimes
I act as if I were living in the

62

past. I’m not crazy, though.
The doctors at the Gardens as-
sure me I’m not crazy.”

“Of course you’re not,” the
young man said soothingly.
“But that’s a long blank — five
years.”

“I went the limit, really.
Twenty years.”

“Then you must be the man
they call Slick!”

“You’ve heard of my case?”
“I was with you the night
you made my father put us in
the field.”

“Dickie Porter! How you
have grown! I’ve always told
your father I didn’t want to
meet you. He said if it was
going to happen, it would,
whether he introduced us or
not. But I hate to face you,
after taking such a large slice
out of your life — ”

“But I’m still young. You’re
the one who’s had the worst of
it, because when you come out
of the blank, you won’t have
so many years left. But you
have the comfort of knowing
you really did something
worth while. Your case and
mine have been invaluable to
the research, particularly
yours, because it was with you
that my father developed the
conditioning techniques. If it
hadn’t been for you, it would
have been very difficult to find
anyone willing to draw a
twenty-year blank.”

“No. Not even a lifer would
want that. But I don’t take
any credit for it. I did it only
because I was so bull-headed

SYLVIA JACOBS

I wouldn’t listen to what Dr.
Porter was trying to tell me.”
“I came out of it six months
ago,” the young man said.
“Now I can consciously hear,
and feel, and smell, just like
other people. I don’t have to
wait till tomorrow to remem-
ber what I said to somebody
today, or what tonight’s din-
ner tasted like.”

<<T’M SO glad to hear that!”
-J- Slick said. “Dr. Tyson says
I should be coming out of it
soon, too. Say, wait a minute
— I heard what you said just
now — I’m hearing what I said
myself — why, I’ve had full
sensory impressions for sev-
eral minutes now, but it kind
of sneaked up on me — ”

The young man seized
Slick’s hand and pumped it
vigorously. “Congratulations !
You’re out of it!”

“Oh, this is wonderful, won-
derful! It’s like — like coming
back to life. I must go home and
tell Dr. Tyson at once ! Please
go with me. It’ll do you good
to get out of the city. We’re
the only two people who’ve
drawn such a long blank — we
have so much in common. I’ll
fix you a chicken dinner. I
raise my own. Just think, to
taste my own fried chicken !”
“I wish I could go, but it’ll
have to be some other time. I
have a date for the opera.
When you see it on the Tri-di-
cast you’ll know my girl and
I are in the studio audience.”
“Oh. a girl!” Slick said. “Of

TIME PAYMENT

course there’d be a girl, now
that you’re out of the blank. I
won’t keep you. But there’s
just one thing I must ask you
— do you ever remember
ahead? Consciously, that is?”

“A few times. But the con-
scious fore-memories are mix-
ed with post-memories and
impossible to place according
to dates. It’s the same objec-
tion that applies when people
remember ahead in dreams —
you don’t know which part of
the dream is a fore-memory
until it happens.”

“Maybe some day they’ll
learn to sort those conscious
fore-memories out. If I could
do it, I would know whether
you are ever coming to see
me.”

“I will come,” the young
man promised. “Believe me, I
will.”

Absorbed in his newly found
sensations, Slick took the ele-
vator a hundred and thirty-
three floors to ground level,
reminding himself not to go
too far and wind up in one of
the sixty levels below ground.
Then he stopped the North-by-
Northwest radial car and
punched the button for city
limits, thus avoiding the neces-
sity of dealing with the circle
lettering system.

He sat in the speeding little
car, watching the faces of the
other passengers, until each,
in turn, got off at their respec-
tive stops. Got off to go to lux-
urious apartments that were
nothing more than cells, with

63

four-sided soundproofing sep-
arating neighbor from neigh-
bor, with air, newspapers,
prepared meals and all other
deliveries coming by chute.
How could they bury them-
selves in the ugly angularity
of masonry and steel? How
could they, who had always
had full senses, deny them-
selves the sting of wind, the
scent of soil and grass, the
sound and sight of ocean
breakers? How the world had
changed in his lifetime, with
people who had never commit-
ted anti-social acts imprison-
ing themselves, while those
who had needed conditioning
enjoyed the therapy of free-
dom.

When the car reached city
limits, the door opened auto-
matically and Slick, the only
passenger left, passed through
the shower that sprayed his
skin with a porous, temporary
plastic coating against the
chill outside air. He walked
across the thick ground-cover,
exquisitely aware of the sen-
sation of softness under his
feet, leaving the awesome bulk
of the city behind.

Before him swept the ex-
panse of Recidivist Gardens,
on gently rolling hills, border-
ing the sea. Clearly though he
remembered it, this was the
first time he had seen it with
full and immediate sensory
impact. The moon silvered the
foliage, cast a path upon the
water. Here and there, lights
were on in the cottages nestled

64

among the foliage, the domed,
transparent cottages that com-
bined the psychological effect
of living outdoors with the
comfort of shelter. The sweet
note of a bell buoy clove the
night.

The beauty was almost un-
bearable, coming so sharply
to long blanked-out senses.
The return of immediate
awareness, and the knowledge
that Dickie Porter, the only
human being with whom he
had a kinship of experience,
did not hate him, was too
much happiness for one day.
Slick breathed deeply of the
salt air, and felt a catch in his
heart. He raised a thin hand
to his chest.

THE young man who had
spoken to Slick in the ra-
dial corridor found the obitu-
ary item in the newspaper he
took from the chute with his
breakfast next morning.

Louis G. Tennant, 65, known
to his friends as “Slick,” a resi-
dent of Recidivist Gardens, died
of a heart attack about 2200 last
night, while returning to his
home after a visit to central
Ellay.

Tennant was one of the first
recidivists to benefit from the
Porter socio-legal conditioning
techniques, and was noted for
his valuable contribution to sci-
ence in volunteering in 1963 for
a twenty-year blank. He was one
of two men who have gone this
far ahead, the other being Dr.

SYLVIA JACOBS

Porter's son, Richard S. Porter,
Jr., level 72, SSE, circle XA, apt.
1722.

The Tennant case did much to
direct public attention to the
Porter techniques, helping to
pave the way for a drastic revi-
sion of the criminal statutes, and
to establish the concept that
punishment rather than treat-
ment for anti-social acts is as
barbarous as punishment rather
than treatment for the insane.

When informed of the death,
and asked whether subconscious
fore-memories of these develop-
ments motivated Tennant to vol-
unteer as a research subject, Dr.
Richard Porter, U.C.L.A., said
that the effect of subconscious
fore-memories as a compulsion
to action is as yet imperfectly
understood. He stated, however,
that in certain individuals, the
fore-memory compulsive factor
appears to operate closer to the
conscious level than in others. He
said that, before going into the

blank, Tennant was noted for
the strength and reliability of
his “hunches.” He also recalled
that Tennant and Richard Por-
ter, Jr., were the last two sub-
jects treated in the original
Metachrono scope, which was de-
stroyed shortly thereafter in an
explosion. Subsequent models
have been modified and improved.

Tennant's estate was willed
to the Recidivists' Christmas
Fund for Dependent Children.
According to Dr. Claude Tyson
of Recidivist Hospital, Tennant
was still in the blank when he
died.

The closing sentence of the
item was wrong, Dick Porter
thought. In his last hours,
Slick had known how it felt to
be alive again, after twenty
years.

Dick Porter was the only
human being who fully appre-
ciated what that meant.

END

WHAT, NEVER?

A common belief among even the best educated and least dogmatic is
that the human brain cannot possibly be outdone — ever — as the most
compact computer.

But cryogenics may make the human brain seem wastefully huge and
cumbersome. Researchers at MIT are experimenting with cryotrons as
computer components — and cryotrons, being smaller than the visible
wave length of light, are far tinier than neurons. If successful, cryogenic
computers could be warehoused by the untold number in the space of a
human skull, for they would truly be subminiaturized brains. And the
data they contained would all be available, whereas 90% of the human
brain is not used, and much of the working 10% is non-computing in
function.

TIME PAYMENT

65

Illustrated by MARTINEZ

There was nothing wrong with him that a Rider
could not cure . . . and the rougher, the better!

THE

LAST

TRESPASSER

By JIM HARMON

THEY would not believe
Malloy was alone in there,
in the padded cell. That made
it worse.

Malloy was in his month for
lying on his stomach to avoid
bed sores. He was walking
from Peoria, Illinois, to De-
troit, Michigan, currently and
he had just reached Chicago.
It was fine to see State Street
again, and the jewelry stores
stuck in the alcoves of
churches with the handsomely
barred windows.

A man in Army-surplus
green with an old library book
was asking for carfare to a

hiring hall when they began
opening the door.

Malloy rolled over on one el-
bow. It was peculiar. They
hadn’t done that for three
years.

Two of them came inside,
thick men with disinterested
faces.

“Try no sudden moves,” one
of them advised him.

“We will anticipate you,”
the other one added.

Malloy went through the
unfamiliar process of stand-
ing up. He looked at two men.
“I wouldn’t try anything
against the four of you. I’m
not that crazy.”

“Time for an interrogation,

66

67

Malloy,” the orderly said.
“Come with us.”

Malloy fell in between them
and left the padded cell,
frowning.

“What kind of an interroga-
tion ?” he asked them.

“What other kind?” one
countered. “A sanity hearing.”
He felt his eyebrows jerk.
His sanity? He thought that
had been established long ago.
Or his lack of it.

MALLOY remembered the
doctor. He hadn’t had
much else to do for several
years.

He was Dr. Heirson, a gray-
ing man with starched face
and collar. But the younger
man sitting with Heirson be-
hind the broad, translucent
desk was a stranger to Malloy.
He seemed to be a comic strip
drawing, all in straight lines.
“Yes, sir.”

“Step forward, Michael,”
Heirson said.

Malloy stepped forward. It
had been a long time since he
had been allowed to travel so
far.

“Now relax, Michael,” the
doctor continued, leaning for-
ward and grinning hideously.
“All you have to do is tell me
the truth.”

“No, I don’t, Doctor. I’m
under no compulsion to tell
you the truth. I’m perfectly
capable of lying if it would
do me any good.”

“Hush that, Michael. You
must not try to make believe

68

you can lie. I know you tell me
only the truth.”

“All right,” Malloy said, ex-
haling deeply. “Believe that I
speak only the truth if you
like. But remember, I just told
you that I’m a liar and that
must be true.”

Heirson blinked in watery
confusion. He was obviously
senile; only the old man’s
Rider kept him from coming
apart at his mental seams.

The angle-faced man spoke
into Heirson’s ear. The old
doctor continued to blink for a
moment, then faced Malloy,
the lines of his face drawn
into an asterisk.

“What? You mean to tell
me that you don’t have an in-
ner voice that urges you to
tell the truth at all times?”
“No,” Malloy explained, "I
do not hear voices.”

“You don’t?”

“Never.”

“And there is no inner sense
that tells you when somebody
is plotting against you ?”
“Absolutely not.”

“And when you are in trou-
ble or danger, there is nothing
that allows you to somehow
look into the future or read
minds or see through walls?”
“I can’t do any of those
things,” Malloy stated.

Heirson threw up his hands, j
“Complete withdrawal from
reality! Pathological! Why is,
he here anyway?”

The younger man grasped 1
the withered thin upper arm
and whispered audibly but

JIM HARMON

not understandably. Heirson’s
face eventually quivered back
in line with Malloy’s.

“Michael, do you know
what year this is?” the doctor
asked.

Malloy thought about that
one. He wasn’t absolutely cer-
tain, but he made some rapid
calculations.

“1978?”

“1979! And what has been
the single most important de-
velopment in human history in
recent times?”

Malloy sighed. He knew
what he was expected to say.
“The coming of the Riders.”
“And what are Riders?”
“Riders,” Malloy recited pa-
tiently, “are elements of a
symbiotic life-form. They have
united with human beings to
make one symbiotic creature.
They have given much more
than, they have taken. All
prominent religions recognize
that they do not interfere with
human free will. They have
made us healthier, virtually
immortal, and near supermen.
The human race now is so
much zoa, and every man is a
zoon. Every man but me.
Damn it, I don’t have any
Rider! I’m not a superman and
I cannot get away with pre-
tending to be one!”

Heirson oscillated his head.
“Michael, Michael, your case
isn’t unique. There are others
who claim that they have no
Riders — usually maintaining
that they are naturally super-
human and need no help from

THE LAST TRESPASSER

some funny kind of foreigner.
They are tolerated the same
way, that B.R., we tolerated
people who claimed they pos-
sessed psychic auras, or who
got up in cathedrals and yelled
that they had no souls. But
you, Michael, are a trouble-
maker. You’ve been rude, vul-
gar, and reckless with your
life and others in your pre-
tense to be Riderless. Your
pathological retreat from real-
ity leaves us with no choice
but to — ”

The other man behind the
desk shoved a paper in front
of Heirson and tapped it
forcefully with an index fin-
ger.

HEIRSON read the paper
and his eyebrows went
askew. “Yes, yes, we have dis-
covered that there is a basic
difference between you and the
others who maintain they have
no Riders. It would seem it has
been established that you
really do not have a Rider. Re-
markable! Yes. Well, I have
no alternative but to dismiss
you from this institution,
Michael Malloy, and to extend
to you my personal apology
for any inconvenience your
three-and-a-half-years’ detain-
ment may have caused you.”

A trick, Malloy thought.
Only what point would
there be in tricking him?

The oppressive horror of it
crushed down upon him with
its full weight.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, sir.

69

Take me back to my padded
cell. I’ve got my rights. I’m
not going out there again.
Maybe I could have learned to
live with it once, but not now.
I can’t face up to living with a
world of supermen, people
who can do everything better
than I can. Take me back. I
think I’m going to get violent
any minute now !”

He took a swing at the near-
est guard, but naturally the
guard’s Rider told him what
was coming and he dodged
deftly, caught Malloy’s arm
and twisted it into half-nelson
to hold him completely, infu-
riatingly helpless. Malloy had
to hold back tears of frustra-
tion.

“Fortunately,” Dr. Heirson
croaked, “you can do no harm
even if you do get violent, and
I’m sure everyone will want
to do everything possible for a
poor unfortunate like your-
self. We all will make allow-
ances.”

“No, no, no!” Malloy an-
nounced with the rhythm of
his stomping feet. “I won’t
leave here ! I won’t!”

THE man beside Heirson
favored Malloy with a
smile ; Malloy wasn’t sure
whether it was friendly or
mocking. The stranger nodded
his head briefly to the guards.

Malloy was dragged, pro-
testing, down the marble-
floored hallway to the entrance
of the mental hospital. His
anguished cries echoed across

70

the ornate ceiling of the old
building.

He was shoved out the front
door with a parcel in brown
paper under his arms.

Malloy made one desperate
attempt to get back inside but
the massive door clanged in
his face, and he could hear the
reverberations dying away in-
side and the steady retreat of
footsteps.

Malloy turned away in pain
from the unaccustomed bril-
liance and warmth of the sun
and banged on the door with
his fists and demanded to be
readmitted.

He grew hoarser and hoars-
er and he slid further and
further down until he was
squatting on the threshold, his
cheek rested against the warm
varnished surface of the door.

Malloy had never been an
overly proud or vain man be-
fore the Riders had come.
After all, he’d had one of the
most menial jobs on Earth ; he
had been a magazine editor.
But now he felt squashed un-
der the thumb of humiliation.

The monstrous indignity of
it all !

To be thrown out of an asy-
lum!

After a time, Malloy felt a
coolness, a wetness on his
head.

He dreamed a little dream to
himself that he knew was a
dream: they were coming to
wrap him in warm sheets
again.

But it was only a dream.

JIM HARMON

This wetness wasn’t warm — it
was chilly. He finally identi-
fied it from his memories. This
was rain.

He stirred himself and gath-
ered up the brown bundle that
he knew must contain his suit,
papers and a little money.

Malloy trudged down the
road toward the town that lay
below the sanitarium, his col-
lar turned up.

He found he didn’t mind the
rain so much. It tended to set-
tle the dust, and the walk
would be a long one.

Grayson amery, the

iron-haired publisher,
greeted Malloy with a firm,
warm, dry handshake.

“Michael, it’s certainly good
to see you again. You are look-
ing well.”

“Yes, the bruises left by
the strait jacket straps don’t
show,” said Malloy.

“A unique miscarriage of
justice,” Amery said.

“I certainly hope it’s unique.
I hope there aren’t any more
poor devils like me locked
away.”

Amery offered Malloy a
chair with a broad, well-man-
icured hand. “I’m confident
that there aren’t. And you are
out now, fortunately.”

“You can call it fortune if
you like,” Malloy said uneas-
ily.

“But you ore glad to be
out?”

Malloy hesitated. “I’m re-
signed to it. The flow of time

THE LAST TRESPASSER

washed some of the salt out of
the wound. Being born is defi-
nitely a traumatic experi-
ence.”

“How well I remember!”
Amery said.

Malloy glanced at him
sharply, then eased back in his
chair. Of course, like every-
body else, thanks to his Rider,
Amery had total recall. Malloy
couldn’t even remember his
first birthday party.

“Is there any way I can be
of help to you, Michael?”
Amery went on.

“Sure. I want my job back.”

Amery’s forehead squeezed
into lines of distress. “Yes, I
was made aware of that. But,
Michael, there have been a lot
of changes in the publishing
business since you were with
us. For instance, it would be
difficult for you to proofread a
manuscript today.”

“I’m hardly the type who
can’t spell. I haven’t forgotten
that.”

“I know, Michael, but here
— have a look at this.”

Amery handed over a sheet
of paper.

Malloy glanced at it. It
seemed a typical sheet of a
writer’s manuscript, though a
horrible yellowish gray that
made the typescript from the
tatters of a ribbon almost il-
legible. It was also smudged
with jelly-doughnut finger-
prints and there were several
holes burned in it by drop-
pings of cigarette ash. Pretty
sloppy, but things didn’t seem

71

to have changed much. Not
until he read the paper.

— /Cynthia/ — / ( walked )
toward — /#((him))#/ —
jauntily (/).

Hi,’” — /she/ — # called
(out) to ((him)).

“ ’/Hello/’ ”, ‘Sweetstuff’,
he / said /, ((trying)) to
# sound # (flrat/) / ... .

Malloy looked up blankly.
“What are all the cockeyed
punctuation marks doing in
there?” he asked.

Amery exhaled Havana
smoke expansively. “That’s
the way things are now, Mi-
chael. Those punctuation
marks indicate whether the
protagonist’s thoughts are
self-directed or Rider-direct-
ed, or a combination of both,
and which is dominant at the
time, human or Rider. They
became absolutely essential
with the coming of the Rid-
ers.”

Malloy covered his lips
with his fingers. “Of course,
I don’t understand this punc-
tuation now. But I could
learn it quickly enough.”

The publisher shook his
massive head. “No, you could-
n’t learn it. You don’t have a
Rider. You could never un-
derstand all the little subtle-
ties.”

“I could fake it.”

“Never. It might get past
the average reader, but the
author and critics would know
right away. All an editor can
do is watch for typographical

72

errors and change them Hie
way the author wanted them
if his fingers hadn’t tripped
over the wrong keys. As it
was, we used to get a good
many complaints from writ-
ers about you making
changes in their work.”
“Grammar,” Malloy ex-
plained. “I got kind of a bug
about grammar. I used to fix
up manuscripts some.”

RUBBING out his fat cigar,
Amery leaned across his
desk. “This isn’t like the
good old days when I started
out, Mike. If I had my way to-
day, I’d get the National
Guard ordered out and have
those miserable slobs grind
out stories with a bayonet at
their backs!” The red gleam
dimmed in Amery’s eyes.
“Those were the days, by
God ! Back then you didn’t
edit manuscripts with any
dinky little blue pencil — you
used a razor blade and a
grease stick!”

Amery slumped down in his
swivel, his eyes now only em-
bers. “But that day is over,
Mike. Writers have their
rights, damn them. You get
the wrong punctuation in one
of their private-eye epics,
Mike, and one of them will
slap a suit against the com-
pany for defacing a Work of
Art, and both of us could
land in jail.”

“Westerns,” Malloy sug-
gested in desperation. “His-
torical fiction. They can’t

JIM HARMON

employ the new punctuation. I
could edit them.”

The vetern publisher shook
his head again. “No. Cow-
boys in westerns today turn
your stomach more than ever
with their damned nobility
and purity. Heroines in his-
torical novels act just as if
deodorants and Living Bras
had been in use back then.
And these stories are written
as if the characters did have
Riders, with only a few minor
concessions.”

“Okay.” Malloy stood up.
“I’ll go quietly.”

“Maybe you’re lucky,
Mike,” Amery said up at him.
“I remember old-fashioned
ideals like privacy and free
will and free enterprise. They
don’t exist any more. You
can’t tell me that my free will
hasn’t been affected. Why,
every business deal I’ve had
since the Coming has been
strictly ethical. You know
that isn’t like me!”

“No,” Malloy admitted
thoughtfully.

“I’m even so ethical now
that I recognize I owe you
something. I know money
can’t repay — ”

“Hell it can’t,” Malloy said
quickly.

The publisher stripped off
a sheaf of bills with delibera-
tion.

Malloy pocketed them.
Enough to keep him eating
for a couple of months. After
that, there was always the
Salvation Army. He didn’t

THE LAST TRESPASSER

have anything to worry
about, really.

“Amery, what would you
do if you were in my place?”
he heard himself ask sudden-
ly.

AMERY steepled his fin-
gers. “I hesitate to sug-
gest a deception to anyone,
but since you ask me what I
would do if I didn’t have a
Rider, I will tell you the
truth : I would pretend that I
did not have a Rider.”

“What are you talking
about? I don’t have a Rider.
So far as I myself personally
know, I’m the only person in
the whole damned world that
doesn’t have one. I’d like to
find out why, but I’m no sci-
entist. So I just have to live
with it. Or without it.”
“There’s a very, very fine
difference,” Amery pointed
out with one finger. “Seman-
tics is no longer a living sci-
ence since the Coming, but I’ll
try to make myself clear. You
must pretend to have to pre-
tend that you don’t have a
Rider. Join the Jockey Set.”
“Jockey Set,” Malloy mum-
bled, massaging the back of
his neck. “I've been put away
for three and a half years.
What’s the Jockey Set?”
“Jockeys are characters
who pretend that they don't
have Riders, that they are
self-sufficient human beings.
Sometimes they use their
Riders’ powers and claim to
be natural supermen. Some-

73

times they leave Rider power
untapped and pretend to be
natural, old-type human be-
ings. But they are all fakes.
The Rider in them comes out
sooner or later.”

“But if they have Riders,
will I be able to fool them into
thinking I’m only pretending
to be without one?”

Amery lifted his shoulders
and drew down the corners of
his mouth. “Who knows? I
will tell you this, though —
you must be pretty much of a
blank to a Rider. If they
won’t touch you, it must
mean they can’t.”

Malloy started to ask him
how he knew what Riders felt
about him, then thought bet-
ter of it.

“How would I fake trying
to hide the fact that I didn’t
have a Rider? I suppose, may-
be, by slipping up and letting
myself predict the future or
something . . .”

“That’s it!” Amery beam-
ed. “You see? It will be easy !”
“Of course,” Malloy said
dully.

“I mean, that is to say, any
time you don’t do something
and don’t do it particularly
well, the Jockeys will only ad-
mire your splendid act.”
Malloy nodded thoughtful-
ly. He turned and shook
hands with the publisher.
“Well, Amery, thanks for the
money — and the advice. You
always were the most devious
master of deceit I ever
knew.”

“Thank you,” Amery said
with great sincerity.

“There’s one more thing.
This may sound silly, but
they found me out pretty
quick after it happened.
What does a Rider look like?
Where do they come from?
Where do they fasten onto the
brain or body of human be-
ings?”

Amery leaned across the
desk and backhanded Malloy
in the mouth.

“Get out!” Amery said.

Malloy left the office, hold-
ing a handkerchief to his cut
lip.

r* WAS a dump. The name
had changed a half dozen
times over the last half cen-
tury, but the spots in
the tablecloths remained the
same. The dump had seen the
Lost Generation, the Beat
Generation, and now the Rid-
den Generation.

Only, Malloy supposed,
they called themselves the
Riderless Generation. Well,
maybe they were. Maybe
they were like him.

He walked in, hanging onto
that thought, his stride long.
He cut down his stride. At
that rate he would be out in
the alley soon.

Self-consciously, Malloy slid
into a chair at a vacant table
so he wouldn’t draw undue
attention.

As he began idly tracing
the grease spots on the table-
cloths that looked like the

74

JIM HARMON

wrappers from a line of ce-
real boxes, all red and white
checks, he discovered every
shaved head in the room was
triangulating him.

He shifted uncomfortably.
He was playing it middle-of-
the-road. He had a close crew-
cut and wore a plaid flannel
shirt and purple velvet ballet
leotards. Maybe he was too
far on the conservative side
for here.

“Spell it, saddle,” the
counterman called to him
without coming front.

“Cola,” he ordered. "With
chickory, pecans and honey.”

“One sou’easter on the
path,” the counterman called
out tiredly.

“With you’re going to sit
there, He?” a liquid female
voice flowed into his ear.

“With I’m doing it, She,”
Malloy said, not turning.

She eased around in front
of the table. She was red-hair-
ed and built, wearing black
leotards and a coat of black
enamel.

“Your pupils are going to
wear me away,” the redhead
said.

“I’ve only got eyes. How
else can I read you?”

“That is Truth. Tru-u-th.”

The counterman set out
Malloy’s drink. “It’s waiting
for you, saddle. Don’t tease
it or it’ll bite.”

He went for the cola and
brought it to the table.

“You came back?” she said.

He pulled up his chair. “I

THE LAST TRESPASSER

always come back. You can
risk money on it. Saddle up?”
“Saddle before the post, my
touchstone.”

THE girl sat down. Her
green eyes were moving,
always moving, but mostly
over Malloy, his chair, the
table. “You going to keep
possession here long?”

“I don’t know any reason
why not,” said Malloy.

“Of course you don’t!” she
snapped. “Only — they close
at five.”

“The billboard gives it two
dozen hours a day.”

“They trim a little off at
five. To sweep the floors and
change the tableshrouds.”
“Change ’em from one
table to another,” Malloy
jibed.

“You formed it. Clean ones
in front, dirty ones in the
shadows. Let’s try breathing
air,” she suggested.

“Wait’ll we gate up. I’ve
got pecans to drink.”

The counterman’s hawking
laugh filled the room. “Let
him wait, Mandy. I might as
well wait to later to sweep it
in.”

Her face caught fire for an
instant. “The Board of
Health don’t go away just be-
cause you can read their dirty
minds.”

“So take him out,” the
counterman snarled.

Malloy suddenly decided he
had played hard to get long
enough. This was his first

75

chance to get in with the
Jockeys. From what he had
heard, they had some kind of
underground set-up to help
their own in business and the
arts. He needed that help.

“Let’s lope,” he said, push-
ing his chair back and leaving
silver on the table for the
drink and a tip.

He touched the girl’s lac-
quered arm and steered her
toward the door.

Behind him, the floor fell in.

Ripping, tearing, render-
ing, splintering, crashing,
crushing, reverberating bed-
lam!

Of course, it couldn’t have
been the floor caving in, Mal-
loy thought as he turned to
see a great hole where the
floor had disappeared.

The hole was where the
table and chair he had been
using had stood a moment be-
fore.

Flapping at the sides of the
cave-in were innumerable
thicknesses of linoleum, and
between each one an incredible
accumulation of filth and
debris — 0. Henry candy bar
wrappers, a cover from a
Collier’s, a booklet on the new
Packard (“Ask the Man Who
Owns One”), a newspaper
article on Flo Ziegfield’s girls
(stop thinking in slogans),
but mostly just dirt— dust,
webs, lint, filth. There had
been no boards under the
table ; the ends of the exposed
boards weren’t freshly broken
but old and rotted porously

76

smooth. Only the linoleum and
the dirt had supported the
table for years.

Malloy edged closer and
saw some broken sticks lying .
on a jagged pile of coke stand-
ing out black in the darkness
far below.

The redhead pulled him
back from the edge, her fin-
gers digging into his biceps,
writhing with a strangle pas-
sionate intensity, as if she
were trying to knead him into
a layer for a pie.

“With . you’re a REAL
Jockey, He, a REAL Jockey,
a REAL ONE. Truth! I’m
going to take you to the Com-
missioner, He, the Commis-
sioner in his saddle.”

Somehow, uncertain, yet :
surely, Malloy was dimly
pleased at this.

<<T\ON’T say it,” the fat
-L7 man remarked, glanc-
ing up for an instant, then
lowering his eyes to the splay
of papers on his desk. “No
esoteric jargon, please.”

“All right,” Malloy said
readily. “Shall I sit down?”
“By all means, saddle up.”
A second chin trembled.
“Damn it, there I go. Have a
chair.”

Malloy took the only chair
not piled down with books, or
maps, or correspondence, or
manuscripts, or notes. It had
a straight back and a plastic
seat, piously uncomfortable.

The big man looked up a
second time and folded rows

JIM HARMON

of pink sausages complacent-
ly. “So you want to be a
Jockey, eh?”

Malloy thinned his lips and
licked the insides of them,
making a snap judgment.
“Not really. I don’t have a
Rider, and I want what help
the Jockeys can give me. I’m
not particularly anxious to
acquire introverted slang and
a shaved head, but if that
goes along with the help . . .”
He spread his hands elo-
quently.

“So you don’t think you
have a Rider?”

Malloy didn’t know how to
answer that. “I don’t think I
have a Rider,” he repeated
without inflection.

“I don’t think I have a Rid-
er, either — only I know I do,”
the fat man said.

Malloy stood up elaborately.
“You dirty steed.”

“Oh, sit down, Malloy, sit
down. I’m a Jockey like the
rest of you. There’s only one
difference. I know I’m sick.
I’ve got a Rider and all its
powers, but I could no more
use them than an acrophobe
could climb a ladder up the
Empire State to get at a nak-
ed princess sitting on a bag
of gold.”

Malloy eased back down
onto the chair and shook his
head slowly. “That would be
a hell of a way to be.”

The big man slammed
down two hams made out of
fists. “You are exactly the
same way, sonny boy! Only

THE LAST TRESPASSER

you don’t know any better.”

Malloy swallowed. The man
known as the Commissioner
might be right at that. “Have
it your way,” Malloy said.
“But I sure think I don’t
have a Rider.”

The Commissioner smirked.
Malloy knew what that meant.
He knew men like the fat boy ;
he understood them. He had
had Grayson Amery, Dr.
Heirson — he knew the breed.

“What are you holding
back on me?” Malloy demand-
ed.

“Malloy, do you even know
what a Rider is?”

Malloy paused. Then, "No,
I don’t.”

“I thought not. Shall I tell
you?”

“I imagine you were plan-
ning to.”

The Commissioner braced
his fists on the work surface
of the desk and lifted his
bulk halfway from the chair.
“The Riders are a disease.
Like rabies.”

Malloy cleared his throat.
“That’s one way to look at
them.”

“Don’t be servilely civil to
me. That is an accurate, clin-
ical description of the Riders
— they are a cerebral infec-
tion.”

“You mean their powers of
emergency telepathy and pre-
cognition, their seeming sec-
ondary personality — all that’s
a hallucination?”

Malloy was fevered as he
asked it. It was at last some

77

confirmation of his own
theory. The whole world was
sick, except him.

“That is exactly what I
don’t mean,” the Commis-
sioner said contemptuously.
“The Riders are real entities,
capable of real miracles so far
as we are concerned. But they
aren’t mammals, or insects, or
pure energy forms — they are
viruses.”

“Viruses that can think?”
Malloy asked, aghast.

“No. No one unit of the
strain can think, but chains
of them can. Together they
form different combinations
and responses, like analog
components or brain synapses.
Objectively, they are an in-
fection that can enter the
body anywhere but that al-
ways spread to the prefrontal
lobes — like rabies. Only they
don’t destroy tissue; the Rid-
ers are benign parasites.”

“That’s one word for
them,” Malloy admitted. “But
if they are a virus, there must
be antibodies — is that the
word? — for them?”

The fat man snorted un-
pleasantly. “You can’t fight
an infection that is smart
enough to consciously change
its shape and fight back. Nat-
ural adaptation and mutation
are tough enough. Besides,
nobody would stand for being
cured of his Rider, any more
than you would let me ‘cure’
you of having eyes.”

“Then what was your point
in telling me the nature of the

78

Riders? You weren’t merely
conducting an adult education
class.”

“True.” The Commissioner
burped delicately and settled
back in his chair. “As a mat-
ter of fact, there is one thing
I left out: the Riders aren’t
suited for Earth. They have
difficulty in adapting them-
selves to live on this planet.
Once they get into a human
being, they are okay. But be-
fore that they are weak and
have to get hothouse care. Ex-
actly that — hothouse care.”
Malloy’s tongue stuck to the
roof of his mouth. He pulled
it loose and said, “And you
can break the windows of hot-
houses!”

The Commissioner smiled.
It was unpleasant to watch.

“TVTOTHING personal, Mal-
^ loy,” the Commissioner
whispered almost subvocally
as they lay together in the
green ooze, “but we haven’t
known you long enough to
give you our trust. The first
false step will be a long one
for you — exactly six feet.”
Malloy tried to squint
through the foggy darkness,
and almost instantly gave it
up. “You can’t blame me for
everything. Commissioner. I
told you I wasn’t convinced
that some of the Riders in
there won’t precog our plans
to save themselves.”

“All the ones we are going
to destroy are the unhooked-
up ones. They can’t send any-

JIM HARMON

thing any more than one
unattached telephone could.
They aren’t really very good
with their psi powers. It’s
strictly an emergency talent,
like our sudden spurts of
adrenalin.”

He gave an unsatisfied
grunt and bellied forward.

Up ahead of Malloy, the
Commissioner and an unstable
stable of Jockeys who had
been coming into town for
weeks lay the secret hatchery
of unhosted Rider viruses.
They could only multiply be-
yond a certain self-maintain-
ing balance inside the human
body, and had to be grown in
cultures on Earth, outside the
healthy climate of a null-
gravity, radiated vacuum in
space.

It was the Commissioner’s
plan to destroy all the virus
cultures, so that in eighteen
years or so there would come
along a Rider-free generation
to outnumber the minor su-
permen still infected by the
Riders.

Malloy had a lot of doubts
about the plan, but he was
willing to go along for his
own reasons.

During the past few weeks
of indoctrination and com-
mando training, Malloy had
had time to think. It hadn’t
taken nearly that long to fig-
ure out the Commissioner.

The Commissioner was
simply a man who had to
have power, and he couldn’t
stand for a whole human race

to be more powerful than he
was, just because of a lack
within himself. He was out to
pull everybody down to his
level, so he could stand out
again and take over.

Still, Malloy thought, I
may have something to say
about that.

The men and a few women
crawled through the semi-
tropical Florida mud toward
the low buildings glimmering
in the light from the thin
crescent of moon.

Malloy elbowed a foot closer
to the hothouse breeding fac-
tory up to here in stinking
muck. Any second now, he
thought, somebody is going to
roll over on a cottonmouth.

“Ready with your cloths,”
a man next to him relayed,
first catching his attention and
mostly lip-synching it.

Malloy dug out his Asphix-
ion pad, and readied the tab
to pull off the plastic coating.
Clamped over the guards'
faces, the catalytic agent
would rapidly absorb the
men’s oxygen. With a partial
vacuum in the mouth and lar-
ynx, no cries could carry and
the victim would rapidly black
out.

The pad would be removed
and the guards would be al-
lowed to catch up on their air
intake. They wouldn’t be
harmed in any way final, so
their emergency psi warning
system wasn’t supposed to cut
in.

Malloy shrugged.

THE LAST TRESPASSER

79

The plan would never work.

It was based on equal parts
of megalomania and wishful
thinking.

Malloy’s only problem was
when and how to best expose
the plot before it was found
out without his help.

He couldn’t stand up and
shout a warning. If he tried
that, one of the fanatic Jock-
eys was sure to clamp an As-
phixion pad over his face, and,
with him, they might not be
considerate enough to remove
it.

Only a treacherous, self-
seeking rat would even think
of exposing these poor mis-
guided people and betraying
his own race to some extra-
terrestrial viruses.

Malloy’s elbows slipped out
from under him and he went
face first into the mud.

He forced himself to keep
from spluttering and lifted his
head. Where had that idea
come from ?

finally acquired a Rider.

But no. A Rider would hard-
ly urge him to carry out an at-
tack against the citadel of ex-
istence to its own kind. It had
to be something simpler, more
elemental than that.

The voice had been his own
conscience crying out against
treason.

He followed the probable
train of circumstances if he
heeded his conscience.

He would most probably be
killed in this useless attack.
He doubted that this was the
only breeding chamber for
Riders, or, that if it were, the
Riders safely in human bodies
couldn’t transplant part of
themselves and start new cul-
tures.

If he wasn’t killed, he would
probably be returned to his
cell, his padded cell, by Rider-
ridden people.

If he were somehow let off,
he would be left to wander the
streets, a public ward.

The trouble with his con-
science was that it wasn’t logi-
cal— and it had a poor mem-
ory.

It didn’t recall those three
and a half years mislaid in
an asylum.

Only an unprincipled —

Malloy shut it off and felt a
drop of sweat running down
the deep crevices between his
eyebrows. My only problem,
he reminded himself again and
again, is how and when to ex-
pose this raid before they dis-
cover it without my help.

The solution bloomed in his
mind.

It was remarkable how well
the human mind could operate
under stress.

He half-rose from the mud
so he would be silhouetted to
anybody watching, and fell
back.

The guards hadn’t spotted
him, but he heard the Jockeys
scurrying toward him through
the mud.

80

JIM HARMON

The squishing halted near
him.

He waited.

The commandos moved
ahead, leaving him behind.

When he felt it was safe,
Malloy took the Asphixion pad
oif his face — a pad without
the transparent plastic coat
being pulled off.

He made out a buddy team
of Jockeys almost on top of the
first Rider-ridden manned
post. All the others had to be
far ahead . . .

Malloy leaped to his feet —
or tried to. He managed to
slosh to his knees.

“Raid!” he screamed. “Jock-
eys are raiding the hothouse!”

The lights flared up, a mag-
nesium, Fourth-of-July night
glare. Guards with guns
sprang from everywhere. The
guns went into action. Clouds
of crystalline Asphixion snow-
ed down on the raiders.

From far back, Malloy
watched in satisfaction.

The sound came from be-
hind him.

The Commissioner blobbed
forward, a distorted ball of
3limy mud.

“I will crush you under my
foot like a bloated white
grub !” the fat man announced
with sincerity.

Malloy’s eyes narrowed in
the darkness.

“Stay away from me Com-
missioner, or I’ll push you
down — way, way down!”

The blocky figure retreated
a step, quivering impotently.

THE LAST TRESPASSER

Malloy nodded to himself.
The Commissioner had spo-
ken too knowingly of a terri-
ble fear of falling.

THE interrogator was the
younger man who sat next
to Dr. Heirson during Malloy’s
release from the hospital.

“I feel you’d like to know
my identity, Mr. Malloy. My
name is Pearson; I work for
the federal government. Now
would you tell me just what
you hoped to gain by betray-
ing the assault force of Jock-
eys?”

It was the crux of the mat-
ter.

Malloy took a deep breath
and said it.

“I want a Rider. I want to
be like everybody else. If you
people have any sense of grati-
tude and justice — and you
seem to — you’ll set up some
kind of scientific project to
find out why I haven’t caught
a case of Riders and to see
that I am properly infected.”
Pearson leaned back in the
other straight chair inside the
rough-boarded outbuilding.

“Mr. Malloy, we know why
none of the Riders who drifted
in from outer space infected
you. You already had a Rider
— an entirely human, not
alien, one. You are schizoid —
you have a split personality.
You adjusted to it to an in-
credible degree and submerged
it, but it was still there and
no alien would touch a man
who already had two minds.”

81

Malloy felt no emotion, only
an inescapable acceptance.
“My conscience,” he said.

Pearson nodded. “Your sec-
ond personality is becoming
steadily less recessive.”

“But telepathy — all the

tricks of the Riders — I can’t
do them.”

“You will be able to. Two
minds are better than one. It
would seem that schizophrenia
is the natural state of super-
men, when properly trained
and integrated. In fact, you
should be able to accomplish
more than a Rider-ridden man
— you will have two human
personalities, and the Riders
are little more than viruses
conscious of their own exist-
ence.”

“You mean I’m a super-
man?”

“Yes. But unfortunately
you are a threat to the present
order because of your non-
Rider attitude. You are being
returned to your padded cell.
There are guards outside. I
hope you will walk out quietly
to meet them.”

Malloy walked out quietly to
meet the guards who would
take him away. On his way
out, he met Grayson Amery
coming in.

Pearson shook hands warm-
ly with the publisher.

“Mr. Amery, the govern-
ment owes you a vote of

thanks for recommending Mal-
loy for this job of infiltrating
the Jocks. Turning against
one of your own kind is never
easy ...”

Amery laughed lightly.
“Malloy was not ‘one of my
kind.’ He was an editor. Even
worse than that, I think in his
attitude he always remained
no more than a writer. I un-
derstand he is being returned
to confinement?”

Pearson looked troubled.
“Yes, sir. Personally, I would
feel more comfortable if he
were eliminated. I am not at
all sure that we can keep Mal-
loy under lock and key once he
develops his potential of
schizophrenia.”

“I know. Unhappily, the
primitive ethics of the Riders
prevent our taking care of
Mike in the most efficient way.
That’s what I wanted to talk
to you about. May I sit down?”
“Please do, sir,” said Pear-
son.

Amery took the vacant
chair and leaned forward with
boyish enthusiasm.

“Mr. Pearson, I have faith
in humanity. I believe we can
keep the benefits of any situa-
tion, including the Riders, and
eliminate the disadvantages
and limitations. My boy, all of
us must start to work to find a
way to override the Riders!”

END

82

JIM HARMON

Space Taxi
$1.29

Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority!
In Fabulous Hobby Kits by MONOGRAM!

If you are excited about tomorrow and get a thrill out of
the idea of a man in space ... get a Willy Ley Space
Model in a fascinating Monogram hobby kit

TV Orbiter $1.29

Easy/ Fascinating Assembly

These exciting new models bring space travel closer and
add reality to what you read. Designed by Willy Ley,
author of “Conquest of Space" and other thrillers.
Molded in brilliant color plastic by Monogram, leading
producer of fine hobby kits. Assembly is easy — fascinat-
ing. No tools required. Models are beautiful show and
conversation pieces, with separating stages and many
operational features.

Informativo Booklet Included

Detailed pictorial instructions and booklet by Willy Ley
describing the real space ship and its uses, included
with each model. Use coupon on opposite page.

Easy-to-Assemble, All-Plastic
Authentic, Detailed Willy Ley Models.

Order on Coupon Below. We Pay Postage. Delivery Guaranteed.

SPACE TAXI

Transport and work ship. Opening cargo door and
cargo. Pilot and three figures in space suits. Ter-
restrial globe mounting and base. 9 Vi inches long.
Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. $1.29

TV ORBITER

Television from outer space. Depicts actual rocket,
designed to put a television camera in orbit around
the earth. 3 separating stages, television nose cone,
launching pad, service tower, 3 figures. Molded in
four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. $1.29

PASSENGER ROCKET

Two manned and separating stages for passenger serv-
ice in outer space at 100 mile altitude. Retractable
landing gear, launching pad, 5 figures. Molded in 3
colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. $1.49

ORBITAL ROCKET

Manned rocket for controlled orbital flight around the
earth. 3 separating stages, landing gear, removable
fuel tanks, launching pad, 5 figures. Molded in four
colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. $1.49

IF Science Fiction 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N.Y.

Send at once, postpaid, Willy Ley Space Models as checked below. Remittance for $. —
enclosed.

□ Space Taxi $1.29 □ TV Orbiter $1.29

□ Passenger Rocket $1.49 □ Orbital Rocket $1.49

’one Stati

The biggest blackmail stunt
ever, it relied on no skeleton
in the closet. This had . . .

the Martian
in the Attic

By FREDERIK POHL
Illustrated by MORROW

DUNLOP was short and
pudgy ; his eyelashes were
blond and his hair was gone.
He looked like the sort of man
you see sitting way off at the
end of the stadium at the Big
Game, clutching a hot dog and
a pennant and sitting with his
wife. Who would be making
him explain every play. Also
he stuttered.

■■ ^ s < ■ . , ' •

s /

:vvJv%'*v

Wm
mm

85

The girl at the reception
desk of LaFitte Enterprises
was a blue-eyed former model.
She had Dunlop catalogued.
She looked up slowly. She said
bleakly: “Yes?”

“I want to see Mr. LaF-F-
F — ” said Dunlop, and paused
to clear his throat. “I want to
see Mr. La Fitte.”

The ex-model was startled
enough to blink. Nobody saw
Mr. LaFitte! Oh, John D. the
Sixth might. Or President
Brockenheimer might drop by,
after phoning first. Nobody
else. Mr. LaFitte was a very
great man who had invented
most of America’s finest gadg-
ets, and sold them for some of
America’s finest money, and
he was not available to casual
callers. Particularly nobodies
with suits that had come right
off a rack.

The ex-model was, however,
a girl with a sympathetic
heart — as was known only to
her mother, her employer and
the fourteen men who, one
after another, had broken it.
She was sorry for Dunlop. She
decided to let the poor jerk
down easy and said: “Who
shall I say is calling, sir? Mr.
Dunlop? Is that with an ‘O,’
sir? One moment.” And she
picked up the phone, trying
not to smile.

The reception room was
carpeted in real Oriental wool
— none of your flimsy nylon or
even LaFitton ! — and all about
it were the symbols of La-
Fitte’s power and genius. In a

86

nook, floodlighted, stood an
acrylic model of the LaFitte
Solar Transformer, transpar-
ently gleaming. On a scarlet
pedestal in the center of the
room was the LaFitte Ion-Ex-
change Self-Powered Water
Still, in the small or forty-gal-
lon-a-second model. (Two of
the larger size provided all of
London with sparkling clear
water from the muddy, silty,
smelly Thames.)

Dunlop said hoarsely : “Hold
it a second. Tell him that he
won’t know my name, but we
have a mutual friend.”

The ex-model hesitated,
struggling with a new fact.
That changed things. Even
Mr. LaFitte might have a
friend who might by chance be
acquainted with a little blond
nobody whose shoes needed
shining. It wasn’t likely, but
it was a possibility. Especial-
ly when you consider that Mr.
LaFitte himself sprang from
quite humble origins: at one
time he had taught at a uni-
versity.

“Yes, sir,” she said, much
more warmly. “May I have
the friend’s name?”

“I d-don’t know his name.”

“Oh!”

“But Mr. LaFitte will know
who I m-mean. Just say the
friend is a M — is a M — is a
M-Martian.”

The soft blue eyes turned
bleak. The smooth, pure face
shriveled into the hard Vogue
lines that it had possessed be-
fore an unbearable interest in

FREDERIK POHL

chocolate nougats had taken
her from before the fashion
cameras and put her behind
this desk.

“Get out!” she said. “That
isn’t a bit funny !”

The chubby little man said
cheerfully: “Don’t forget the
name, Dunlop. And I’m at 449
West 19th Street. It’s a room-
ing house.” And he left. She
wouldn’t give anyone the mes-
sage, he knew, but he knew
comfortably that it didn’t mat-
ter. He’d seen the little gold-
plated microphone at the
comer of her desk. The La-
Fitte Auto-Sec it was hooked
up to would unfailingly re-
member, analyze and pass
along every word.

“Ho-hum,” said Dunlop to
the elevator operator, “they
make you fellows work too
hard in this kind of weather.
I’ll see that they put in air-
conditioning.”

The operator looked at Dun-
lop as though he was some
kind of a creep, but Dunlop
didn’t mind. Why should he?
He was a creep. But he would
soon be a very rich one.

Hector dunlop trotted

out into the heat of Fifth
Avenue, wheezing because of
his asthma. But he was quite
pleased with himself.

He paused at the comer to
turn and look up at the La-
Fitte Building, all copper and
glass bands in the quaint pe-
riod architecture that LaFitte
liked. Let him enjoy it,

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

thought Dunlop generously. It
looks awful, but let LaFitte
have his pleasures ; it was only
fair that LaFitte have the
kind of building he wanted.
Dunlop’s own taste went to
more modem lines, but there
would be nothing to stop him
from putting up a hundred-
and-fifty-iwo-story building
across the street if he liked.
LaFitte was entitled to every-
thing he wanted — as long as
he was willing to share with
Hector Dunlop. As he certain-
ly would be, and probably that
very day.

Musing cheerfully about the
inevitable generosity of La-
Fitte, Dunlop dawdled down
Fifth Avenue in the fierce but
unfelt heat. He had plenty of
time. It would take a little
while for anything to happen.

Of course, he thought pa-
tiently, it was possible that
nothing would happen at all
today. Whatever human the
Auto-Sec reported to might
forget. Anything might go
wrong. But still he had time.
All he had to do was try again,
and try still more after that if
necessary. Sooner or later the
magic words would reach La-
Fitte. After eight years of get-
ting ready for this moment it
didn’t much matter if it took
an extra day or two.

Dunlop caught his breath.

A girl in needle-pointed
heels came clicking by, the hot
breeze plastering her skirt
against her legs. She glanced
casually at the volume of space

87

which Hector Dunlop thought
he was occupying and found it
empty. Dunlop snarled out of
habit; she was not the only
hormone-pumping girl who
had seen nothing where he
stood. But he regained his
calm. To hell with you, my
dear, he said good-humoredly
to himself. I will have you
later if I like. I will have
twenty like you, or twenty a
day if I wish. Starting very
soon.

He sprinted across Forty-
second Street, and there was
the gray familiar old-fashion-
ed bulk of the Library.

On a sentimental impulse he
climbed the steps and went in-
side.

The elevator operator nod-
ded. “Good afternoon, Mr.
Dunlop. Three?”

“That’s right, Charley. As
usual.” They all liked him
here. It was the only place in
the world where that was true,
he realized, but then he had
spent more time here than
anywhere else in the world.

Dunlop got out of the slow
elevator as it creaked to an
approximate halt on the third
floor. He walked reminiscent-
ly down the wide, warm hall
between the rows of exhibits.
Just beyond the drinking
fountain there. That was the
door to the Fortescue Collec-
tion. Flanking it were the
glass cabinets that housed
some of Fortescue’s own Mar-
tian photographs, along with
the unexplained relics of a

88

previous race that had built
the canals.

DUNLOP looked at the
prints and could hardly
keep from giggling. The
Martians were seedy, slime-
skinned creatures with snaky
arms and no heads at all.
Worse, according to Updyke’s
The Martian Adventure, For-
tescue’s own First to Land
and Wilbert, Shevelsen and
Buchbinder’s Survey of In-
digenous Martian Semi-Fauna
(in the Proceedings of the
Astro-Biological Institute for
Winter, 2011), they smelled
like rotting fish. Their mean
intelligence was given by
Fortescue, Burlutski and
Stanko as roughly equivalent
to the Felidae (though Gaff-
ney placed it higher, say about
that of the lower primates).
They possessed no language.
They did not have the use of
fire. Their most advanced
tool was a hand-axe. In short,
the Martians were the dopes
of the Solar System, and it
was not surprising that La-
Fitte’s receptionist had view-
ed describing a Martian as
her employer’s friend as a
gross insult.

“Why, it’s Mr. Dunlop,”
called the librarian, peering
out through the wire grating
on the door. She got up and
came toward him to unlock
the door to the Fortescue Col-
lection.

“No, thanks,” he said has-
tily. “I'm not coming in

FREDERtK POHL

today. Miss Reidy. Warm
weather, isn’t it? Well, I must
be getting along.”

When hell freezes over I’ll
come in, he added to himself
as he turned away, although
Miss Reidy had been extreme-
ly helpful to him for eight
years ; she had turned the
Library’s archives over to
him, not only in the extrater-
restrial collections but wher-
ever his researching nose led
him. Without her, he would
have found it'much more diffi-
cult to establish what he now
knew about LaFitte. On the
other hand, she wore glasses.
Her skin was sallow. One of
her front teeth was chipped.
Dunlop would see only TV
stars and the society debu-
tantes, he vowed solemnly,
and decided that even those
he would treat like dirt.

The Library was pressing
down on him ; it was too much
a reminder of the eight grub-
like years that were now
past. He left it and took a bus
home.

Less than two hours had
elapsed since leaving La-
Fitte’s office.

That wasn’t enough. Not
even the great LaFitte’s or-
ganization would have been
quite sure to deliver and act
on the message yet, and Dun-
lop was suddenly wildly anx-
ious to spend no time waiting
in his rooming house. He
stopped in front of a cheap
restaurant, paused, smiled
broadly and walked across

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

the street to a small, cozy, ex-
pensive place with potted
palms in the window. It
would just about clean out
what cash he had left, but
what of it?

Dunlop ate the best lunch
he had had in ten years, tak-
ing his time. When some fum-
bling chemical message told
him that enough minutes had
elapsed and he walked down
the block to his rooming
house, the men were there.

The landlady peered out of
her window from behind a
curtain, looking frightened.

Dunlop laughed out loud
and waved to her as they
closed in. They were two tall
men with featureless faces.
The heavier one smelled of
chlorophyll chewing gum. The
leaner one smelled of death.

Dunlop linked arms with
them, grinning broadly, and
turned his back on his land-
lady. “What did you tell her
you w-were, boys? Internal
Revenue? The F.B.I.?” They
didn’t answer, but it didn’t
matter. Let her think what
she liked; he would never,
never, never see her again.
She was welcome to the few
pitiful possessions in his
cheap suitcase. Very soon now
Hector Dunlop would have
only the best.

don’t know your

1 boss’s secret, eh?” Dun-
lop prodded the men during
the car ride. “But I do. It
took me eight years to find it

89

out. Treat me with a little re-
spect or I m-might have you
fired.”

“Shut up,” said chloro-
phyll-breath pleasantly, and
Dunlop politely obeyed. It
didn’t matter, like everything
else that happened now. In a
short time he would see La-
Fitte and then —

“Don’t p-p-push!” he said
irritably, staggering before
them out of the car.

They caught him, one at
each elbow, Chlorophyll open-
ing the iron gate at the end
of the walk and Death push-
ing him through. Dunlop’s
glasses came off one ear and
he grabbed for them.

They were well out of the
city, having crossed the Hud-
son. Dunlop had only the
haziest sense of geography,
having devoted all his last
eight years to more profitable
pursuits, but he guessed they
were somewhere in the hills
back of Kingston. They went
into a great stone house and
saw no one. It was a Frank-
enstein house, but it cheered
Dunlop greatly, for it was
just the sort of house he had
imagined LaFitte would need
to keep his secret.

They shoved Dunlop
through a door into a room
with a fireplace. In a leather
chair before a fire (though
the day was hot) was a man
who had to be Quincy La-
Fitte.

“Hello,” said Dunlop with
poise, strutting toward him.

90

“I suppose y-you know why
I — Hey! What are you d-do-
ing?”

Chlorophyll was putting
one gray glove on one hand.
He walked to a desk, opened
it, took out something — a
gun! In his gloved hand he
raised it and fired at the wall.
Splat. It was a small flat
sound, but a great chip of
plaster flew.

“Hey!” said Dunlop again.

Mr. LaFitte watched him
with polite interest. Chloro-
phyll walked briskly toward
him, and abruptly Death
reached for — for —

Chlorophyll handed Dun-
lop the gun he had fired.
Dunlop instinctively grasped
it, while Death took out an-
other, larger, more danger-
ous-looking one.

Dunlop abruptly jumped,
dropped the gun, beginning
to understand. “Wait!” he
cried in sudden panic. “I’ve
g-g — ” He swallowed and
dropped to his knees. “Don’t
shoot! I’ve g-got everything
written d-down in my luh — in
my luh — ”

LaFitte said softly : “Just a
moment, boys.”

Chlorophyll just stopped
where he was and waited.
Death held his gun competent-
ly on Dunlop and waited.

Dunlop managed to stam-
mer: “In my lawyer’s office.
I’ve got the whole th-thing
written down. If anything
happens to me he ruh — he
ruh — he reads it.”

FREDERIK POHt

LaFitte sighed. “Well,” he
said mildly, “that was the
chance we took. All right,
boys. Leave us alone.” Chloro-
phyll and Death took their
scent and their menace out
the door.

Dunlop was breathing very
hard. He had just come very
close to dying, he realized;
one man handed him the gun,
and the other was about to
shoot him dead. Then they
would call the police to deliv-
er the body of an unsuccess-
ful assassin. Too bad, officer,
but he certainly fooled us!
Look, there’s where the bullet
went. I only tried to wing the
poor nut, but — A shrug.

Dunlop swallowed. “Too
bad,” he said in a cracked
voice. “But naturally I had to
take p-precautions. Say. Can
I have a drink?”

Mr. LaFitte pointed to a
tray. He had all the time there
was. He merely waited, with
patience and very little con-
cern. He was a tall old man
with a very bald head, but he
moved quickly when he want-
ed to, Dunlop noticed. Funny,
he hadn’t expected LaFitte to
be bald.

But everything else was
going strictly according to
plan!

HE POURED himself a
stiff shot of twelve-year-
old bourbon and downed it
from a glass that was Steu-
ben’s best hand-etched crys-
tal.

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

He said : “I’ve got you, La-
Fitte! You know it, don’t
you?”

LaFitte gave him a warm,
forgiving look.

“Oh, that’s the boy,” Dun-
lop enthused. “B-Be a good
loser. But you know I’ve
found out what your fortune
is based on.” He swallowed
another quick one and felt the
hot burning tingle spread.
“Well. To b-begin with, eight
years ago I was an undergrad
at the university you taught
at. I came across a reference
to a thesis called Certain Ob-
servations on the Ontogenesis
of the Martian P-Parapri-
mates. By somebody named
Quincy A. W. L-LaFitte,
B.S.”

LaFitte nodded faintly, still
smiling. His eyes were tricky,
Dunlop decided ; they were
the eyes of a man who had
grown quite accustomed to
success. You couldn’t read
much into eyes like those.
You had to watch yourself.

Still, he reassured himself,
he had all the cards. “So I
1-looked for the paper and
I couldn’t f-find it. But I guess
you know that!” Couldn’t find
it? No, not in the stacks, not
in the Dean’s file, not even in
the archives. It was very for-
tunate that Dunlop was a
persistent man. He had found
the printer who had done the
thesis in the first place, and
there it was, still attached to
the old dusty bill.

“I remember the w-words,”

91

Dunlop said, and quoted from
the conclusion. He didn’t stut-
ter at all:

“ ‘It is therefore to be
inferred that the Martian
paraprimates at one time
possessed a mature culture
comparable to the most so-
phisticated milieux of our own
planet. The artifacts and
structural remains were not
created by another race. Per-
haps there is a correlation
with the so-called Shtern-
weiser Anomaly, when con-
jecturally an explosion of
planetary proportions deplet-
ed the Martian water sup-
ply.’ ”

LaFitte interrupted :
“Shternweiser ! You know, I
had forgotten his name. It’s
been a long time. But Shtern-
weiser’s paper suggested that
Mars might have lost its
water in our own historical
times — and then the rest was
easy!’’

Dunlop finished his quota-
tion :

“ ‘In conjunction, these
factors inescapably suggest a
pattern. The Martian para-
primates require an aqueous
phase for development from
grub to imago, as in many
terrestrial invertebrates. Yet
there has not been sufficient
free water on the surface of
Mars since the time of
the Shternweiser explosion
theory. It seems likely, there-
fore, that the present exam-
ples surviving are mere sexed
grubs, and that the adult

92

Martian paraprimate does
not exist in vivo, though its
historical existence is attest-
ed by the remarkable exam-
ples left of their work.’ ”
“And then,” finished Dun-
lop, “you b-began to realize
what you had here. And you
d-destroyed all the copies. All,
th-that is, b-but one.”

IT WAS working ! It was all
working the way it should !
LaFitte would have thrown
him out long ago, of course,
if he had dared. He didn’t
dare. He knew that Dunlop
had followed the long, crook-
ed trail of evidence to its end.

Every invention that bore
the name LaFitte had come
from a Martian mind.

The fact that the paper was
suppressed was the first clue.
Why suppress it? The name
attached to the paper was the
second — though it had taken
an effort of the imagination
to connect a puny B.S. with
the head of LaFitte Enter-
prises.

And all the other clues had
come painfully and laborious-
ly along the trail that led past
Miss Reidy’s room at the Li-
brary, the Space Exploration
wing of the Smithsonian, the
Hall of Extraterrestrial Zoo-
forms at the Museum of Nat-
ural History, and a thousand
dusty chambers of learning all
over the country.

LaFitte sighed. “And so
you know it all, Mr. Dunlop.
You’ve come a long way.”

FREDERIK POHL

He poured himself a gen-
tlemanly film of brandy in a
large inhaler and warmed it
with his breath. He said medi-
tatively: “You did a lot of
work, but, of course, I did
more. I had to go to Mars, for
one thing.”

“The S-Solar Argosy,” Dun-
lop supplied promptly.

LaFitte raised his eye-
brows. " That thorough? I
suppose you realize, then, that
the crash of the Solar Argosy
was not an accident. I had to
cover up the fact that I was
bringing a young Martian
back to Earth. It wasn’t easy.
And even so, once I had him
here, that was only half the
battle. It is quite difficult to
raise an exogenous life-form
on Earth.”

He sipped a drop of the
brandy and leaned forward
earnestly. “I had to let a Mar-
tian develop. It meant giving
him an aqueous environment,
as close as I could manage to
what must have been the con-
ditions on Mars before the
Shternweiser event. All guess-
work, Mr. Dunlop! I can only
say that luck was with me.
And even then — why, think of
yourself as a baby. Suppose
your mother had abandoned
you, kicking and wetting your
diaper, on Jupiter. And sup-
pose that some curious-shaped
creature that resembled Mom-
my about as much as your
mother resembled a tree then
took over your raising.”

He shook his head solemnly.

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

“Spock was no help at all. The
problem of discipline ! The toi-
let training! And then I had
nothing but a naked mind, so
to speak. The Martian adult
mind is great, but it needs to
be filled with knowledge be-
fore it can create, and that,
Mr. Dunlop, in itself took me
six difficult years.”

He stood up. “Well,” he said,
“suppose you tell me what you
want.”

Dunlop, caught off base,
stammered terribly: “I w-w-
want half of the tuh — of the
tuh — ”

“You want half of the
take?”

“That’s ruh— that’s— ”

“I understand. In order to
keep my secret, you want me
to give you half of everything
I earn from my Martian’s in-
ventions. And if I don’t
agree?”

Dunlop said, suddenly pan-
icked: “But you must! If I
t-t-tell your secret, anyone can
do the same !”

LaFitte said reasonably:
“But I already have my
money, Mr. Dunlop. No, that’s
not enough of an inducement
. . . But,” he said after a mo-
ment, “I doubt that such a con-
sideration will persuade you to
keep still. And, in fact, I do
want this matter kept confi-
dential. After all, six men died
in the crash of the Solar Ar-
gosy, and on that sort of thing
there is no statute of limita-
tions.”

He politely touched Dun-

93

lop’s arm. “Come along. You
deduced there was a Martian
in this house? Let me show
you how right you were.”

ALL the way down a long
carpeted corridor, Dunlop
kept hearing little clicks and
rustles that seemed to come
from the wall. “Are those your
b-bodyguards, LaFitte? Don't
try any tricks !”

LaFitte shrugged. “Come on
out, boys,” he said without
raising his voice; and a few
feet ahead of them a panel
opened and Death and Chloro-
phyll stepped through.

“Sorry about that other
business, Mr. Dunlop,” said
Chlorophyll.

“No hard f-feelings,” said
Dunlop.

LaFitte stopped before a
door with double locks. He
spun the tumblers and the
door opened into a dark, dank
room.

“V-r-r-roooom, v-r-r-room.”
It sounded like a huge deep
rumble from inside the room.

Dunlop’s pupils slowly ex-
panded to admit more light,
and he began to recognize
shapes.

In the room was a sort of
palisade of steel bars. Behind
them, chained to a stake,
was —

A Martian!

Chained?

Yes, it was chained and
cuffed. What could only be the
key hung where the Martian
would be able to see it always

94

but reach it never. Dunlop
swallowed, staring. The Mar-
tians in Fortescue’s photo-
graphs were slimy, ropy, ugly
creatures like thinned-out sea
anemones, man-tall and head-
less. The chained creature that
thundered at him now was like
those Martians only as a frog
is like a tadpole. It possessed
a head, round-domed, with
staring eyes. It possessed a
mouth that clacked open and
shut on great square teeth.

“V-r-r-room,” it roared, and
then Dunlop listened more
closely. It was not a wordless
lion’s bellow. It was English!
The creature was talking to
them ; it was only the Earth’s
thick atmosphere that made it
boom. “Who are you?” it
croaked in a slobbery-drunk
Chaliapin’s boom.

Dunlop said faintly: “God
b-bless.” Inside that hideous
skull was the brain that had
created for LaFitte the Solar
Transformer, the Ion-Ex-
change Self-Powered Water
Still, the LaFitte Negative-
Impedance Transducer, and a
thousand other great inven-
tions. It was not a Martian
Dunlop was looking at ; it was
a magic lamp that would bring
him endless fortune. But it
was an ugly nightmare.

“So,” said LaFitte. “And
what do you think now, Mr.
Dunlop ? Don’t you think I did
something great? Perhaps the
Still and the Transducer were
his invention, not mine. But I
invented him."

FREDERIK POHL

Dunlop pulled himself to-
gether. “Y-yes,” he said, bob-
bing his head. He had a con-
cept of LaFitte as a sort of
storybook blackmail victim,
who needed only a leer, a whis-
per and the Papers to start
disgorging billions. It had not
occurred to him that LaFitte
would take honest pride in
what he had done. Now, know-
ing it, Dunlop saw or thought
he saw a better tactic.

He said instantly: “Great?
N-No, LaFitte, it’s more than
that. I am simply amazed that
you brought him up without,
say, r-rickets. Or juvenile de-
linquency. Or whatever Mar-
tians might get, lacking prop-
er care.”

LaFitte looked pleased.
“Well, let’s get down to busi-
ness. You want to become an
equal partner in LaFitte En-
terprises, is that what you’re
asking for?”

Dunlop shrugged. He didn’t
have to answer. That was for-
tunate ; in a situation as tense
as this one, he couldn’t have
spoken at all.

LaFitte said cheerfully :
“Why not? Who needs all this?
Besides, some new blood in the
firm might perk things up.”
He gazed benevolently at the
Martian, who quailed. “Our
friend here has been lethargic
lately. All right, I’ll make you
work for it, but you can have
half.”

“Th— Th— Thank—”

“You’re welcome, Dunlop.
How shall we do it? I don’t

suppose you’d care to take my
word — ”

Dunlop smiled.

LAFITTE was not offended.

“Very well, we’ll put it in
writing. I’ll have my attorneys
draw something up. I suppose
you have a lawyer for them to
get in touch with?” He snap-
ped his fingers. Death stepped
brightly forward with a silver
pencil and Chlorophyll with a
pad.

“G-G-Good,” said Dunlop,
terribly eager. “My 1-lawyer is
P. George Metzger, and he’s in
the Empire State Building,
forty-first fl — ”

“Fool!” roared the Martian
with terrible glee. LaFitte
wrote quickly and folded the
paper into a neat square. He
handed it to the man who
smelled of chlorophyll chewing
gum.

Dunlop said desperately :
"That’s not the s-same law-
yer.”

LaFitte waited politely.
“Not what lawyer?”

“My other lawyer is the one
that has the p-p-papers.”
LaFitte shook his head and
smiled.

Dunlop sobbed. He couldn’t
help it. Before his eyes a bil-
lion dollars had vanished, and
the premium on his life-in-
surance policy had run out.
They had Metzger’s name.
They knew where to find the
fat manila envelope that con-
tained the sum of eight years’
work.

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

95

Chlorophyll, or Death, or
any of LaFitte’s hundreds of
confidential helpers, would go
to Metzger’s office, and per-
haps they would present
phony court orders or perhaps
they would bull their way
through, a handkerchief over
the face and a gun in the hand.
One way or another they
would find the papers. The
sort of organization that La-
Fitte owned would surely not
be baffled by the office safe of
a recent ex-law clerk, now in
his first practice.

Dunlop sobbed again, wish-
ing he had not economized on
lawyers; but it really made
no difference. LaFitte knew
where the papers were kept
and he would get them. It re-
mained only for him to erase
the last copy of the informa-
tion— that is, the copy in the
head of Hector Dunlop.

Chlorophyll tucked the note
in his pocket and left. Death
patted the bulge under his arm
and looked at LaFitte.

“Not here,” said LaFitte.

Dunlop took a deep breath.

“G-Good-bye, Martian,” he
said sadly, and turned toward
the door. Behind him the thick,
hateful voice laughed.

“You’re taking this very
well,” LaFitte said in sur-
prise.

Dunlop shrugged and step-
ped aside to let LaFitte pre-
cede him through the doorway.

“What else can I d-do?” he
said. “You have me cold.
Only — ” The Death man was

96

mrough the door, and so was
LaFitte, half-turned politely
to listen to Dunlop. Dunlop
caught the edge of the door,
hesitated, smiled and leaped
back, slamming it. He found a
lock and turned it. “Only you
have to c-catch me first!” he
yelled through the door.

Behind him the Martian
laughed like a wounded whale.

“You were very good,” com-
plimented the thick, tolling
voice.

“It was a matter of s-simple
s-self -defense,” said Dunlop.

HE COULD hear noises in
the corridor, but there
was time. “N-Now! Come,
Martian ! We’re going to get
away from LaFitte. You’re
coming w-with me, because he
won’t dare shoot you and —
And certainly you, with your
great mind, can find a way for
us both to escape.”

The Martian said in a thick
sulky voice : “I’ve tried.”

“But I can help ! Isn’t that
thek-k-key?”

He clawed the bright bit of
metal off the wall. There was
a lock on the door of steel bars,
but the key opened it. The
Martian was just inside, ropy
arms waving.

“V-r-r-room,” it rumbled,
eyes like snake’s eyes staring
at Dunlop.

“Speak more c-clearly,”
Dunlop requested impatiently,
twisting the key out of the
lock.

“I said,” repeated the thick

FREDERIK POHL

draiwl, “I’ve been waiting for
you.”

“Of course. What a t-terri-
ble life you’ve led !”

Crash went the door behind
him ; Dunlop didn’t dare look.
And this key insisted on stick-
ing in its lock ! But he freed it
and leaped to the Martian’s
side — at least there they
would not dare fire, for fear
of destroying their meal-
ticket !

“You c-can get us out of
here,” Dunlop panted, fum-
bling for the lock on the Mar-
tian’s ankle cuff and gagging.
(It was true. They did smell

like rotting fish.) “B-but you
must be strong! LaFitte has
been a father to you, but what
a f-false f-father ! Feel no loy-
alty to him, Martian. He made
you his slave, even if he d-did
keep you healthy and s-sane.”
And behind him LaFitte
cleared his throat. “But I
didn’t,” he observed. “I didn’t
keep him sane.”

“No,” rumbled the thick,
slow Martian voice. “No, he
didn’t.”

The ropes that smelled like
rotting fish closed lovingly and
lethally around Dunlop.

END

SUPERWEAPON

Few foes have been as great a challenge to man’s claim to supremacy
on this planet as insects, and few, including perhaps his own kind, have
inflicted such huge losses in life, health and wealth. Hands, swatters and
drainage got a big assist in insect poisons, especially recently. But the
tiny, deadly enemy has the advantage of brief generations; survival of
the fittest has produced insecticide-resistant strains. And poisons aimed
at insects all too often hit other forms of life, including ourselves, by
getting into food and drinking water.

Newest weapon in the insect war is sex. Totally selective, it can de-
stroy only one or another species, not the beneficial as well as the
destructive.

The method itself is simpler by far than any other. Great numbers
of the males of any chosen kind of insect are sterilized by cobalt-60
radiation, and dropped into infested areas at breeding time. The sterilized
males, says Dr. Arthur Lindquist, entomologist of the U. S. Department
of Agriculture, “compete very successfully with the normal ones. The
average result is that 60 to 70 per cent of the eggs laid are sterile and
won’t hatch.” Repeated at each breeding season, the end result is total
extermination in plague sections, with especial success on islands like
Rota, near Guam, where weekly drops of three million sterile male fruit
flies for a year should wipe out the devourers of its melons.

For the first time in the history of mankind, complete — and completely
safe — extinction of insect pests appears to be a realistic possibility.

THE MARTIAN IN THE ATTIC

97

Galaxy. . . around the world

With your literally thousands of letters you have proven that Galaxy is
the most widely read science-fiction magazine on Earth (see above for
evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a
profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your
dividends. And this, as you’ve seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting
stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet
of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.)

GALAXY Publishing Corp., 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y.

(60* additional
per 6 issues
foreign postage)

Enter my subscription for the New Giant 196-page
Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for:

6 Issues @ $2.50 □ 12 Issues @ $4.50 □ 24 Issues @ $8.50 □

Name_

.City_

Address-

Worlds of if

Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl

CONSIDER a story in which
the mutated crew of an in-
terstellar derelict forget that
they are on a ship and revert
to savagery; it is not Robert
A. Heinlein’s Universe. Con-
sider a story in which mutat-
ed, intelligent rats strive for
control of a spaceship against
its human crew; it is not A.
Bertram Chandler’s Giant
Killer.

These ingredients — as well
as a good many others
of reminiscent flavor — form
Starship, a first novel by
Brian Aldiss (Signet).

Starship is described on its
cover by a single, bare-faced
adjective : “magnificent.” This
is an exaggeration. But Aldiss
comes very close indeed to de-
serving such a word ! The
book is vital. It is impossible
to forget its precursors, but
as the story builds and grows,
we no longer worry about
them. This is no dreary re-
hash; this is a novel of taste
and perception.

Starship’s rats, once we
realize that they are not the
same as Giant Killer’s, become
worthy inventions. They carry
telepathic rabbits with them
in their wars, for interrogat-
ing human POWs. Their
scouts are telepathic moths : a

part of their lineage might
well be Ralph Milne Farley’s
“new-souls” of a generation
back, but these moths are de-
scribed in terms and with
emotions that Farley never
evoked.

Indeed, Starship’s second
flaw is an error on the side
of the angels : its invention is
over-abundant; there is so
much in the book that Aldiss
lets us glimpse a treasure only
to whisk it away. His tele-
pathic bunny is a triumph of
compassionate characteriza-
tion . . . shown once, never
seen again. There is a novel
tribal game, hinting at pro-
vocative changes in social be-
havior. But the first match we
see is the last one.

No matter. Roy Complain,
Starship’s hero, battles his
way through the ponic-tan-
gled jungles of the corridors,
past human and non-human
foes to the enemy country
called “Forwards” ... to the
semi-mythical Control Room
itself . . . and finally to a
denouement that is skillful,
fast and convincing. And we
are with him all the way.
Magnificent? No, the word is
too strong. But it is only an
exaggeration, not an outright
lie.

99

It is good to know that this
first novel is shortly to be fol-
lowed by at least two more in
this country. Brian Aldiss
shows every sign of being a
writer of imagination and
power; it will not need much
to make him one of the great
ones.

A YEAR or so ago the
Seminar Committee of
Princeton University invited
Kingsley Amis (a name which
seldom appears in print with-
out the immediate addition of
the phrase, “one of England’s
Angry Young Men”) to deliv-
er a series of lectures in
Princeton’s Christian Gauss
Seminars in Criticism. Amis
accepted, and for his subject
elected to discuss science fic-
tion in its modern form.

It is not on record whether
the Seminar Committee was
pleased or otherwise at his
choice. But it is known,
first, that Princeton’s faculty
turned out in large number
for the seminars when, in
early 1959, they were deliv-
ered and, second, that the
faculty was nearly crowded
out by the influx of editors
and publishers from New
York and Philadelphia anx-
ious to get an authoritative
fresh view on just what it
was that they themselves
were doing.

Harcourt, Brace has now
made it possible for those who
missed the seminars to get
that view all the same, now

100

enlarged, indexed, handsome-
ly bound and available to all
in book form under the title,
New Maps of Hell. Examina-
tions of science fiction have
appeared often in the past
decade, but this is not merely
the newest of them. It is the
best.

Amis is himself a novelist
— Lucky Jim, That Uncertain
Feeling, etc. He is also a critic
of substance, a poet, a jazz
buff and a playwright (in
which mood he wrote one of
the few science fiction plays
ever to find a home on the
B.B.C.’s Third Programme).
But these considerations are
mostly irrelevant. New Maps
of Hell demonstrates its au-
thority at once. It proceeds
immediately to a lucid and en-
tertaining exposition of just
what its author seeks in a sci-
ence fiction story, and a sum-
mary of what any person of
similar tastes will reliably
find.

It is not necessary to ac-
cept every one of Amis’s esti-
mates. He is an Angry Young
Man, as much as any writer
of talent can be said to be
any one thing, and what in-
terests him most is the science
fiction of comment, preferably
social comment. Disagree-
ment only indicates that one
starts from other interests.
Still, his estimates are formed
with great care, and the test
of a theory is the accuracy of
the deductions that can be
drawn from it. For example,

FREDERIK POHL

this reviewer is prepared to
testify that Amis’s deduc-
tions, as they relate to such
“behind-the-scenes” matters
as questions of intent and of
the relative contributions of
partners in a collaboration,
are of a previously unprece-
dented accuracy.

Amis, like any true lover,
neither demands perfection
nor overlooks flaws. His con-
clusion is that science fiction
is indeed worth while, con-
taining in it something of
special value which is not to
be found, except in trace
quantities, anywhere else at
all. “In the first place,” he
says, “one is grateful for the
presence of science fiction as
a medium in which our society
can criticize itself, and sharp-
ly ... In the second place,
one is grateful that we have
a form of writing which is
interested in the future, which
is ready ... to treat as var-
iables what are usually taken
to be constants, which is set
on tackling those large, gen-
eral, speculative questions
that ordinary fiction so often
avoids. This is no less true
when all allowance has been
made for the shock and pain
felt by some when they find
those questions answered in
a way that does much less
than justice to their complex-
ity. Most answers to anything
are overwhelmingly likely to
be crude, and I cannot bring
myself to believe that the
most saturating barrage of

WORLDS OF IF

crude answers really menaces
the viability of the sensitive
and intelligent answer ; if that
were the way the world work-
ed, it would long since have
stopped working altogeth-
er .. . We could do with
more, not less, of that habit
of mind which will look be-
yond the attempted solution
of problems already evident
to the attempted formulation
of problems not yet distin-
guishable. That is the path
which science fiction ... is
just beginning to tread, and
if it can contrive to go on
moving in that direction, it
will not only have secured its
future, but may make some
contribution to the security
of our own.”

IN The Best from Fantasy
and Science Fiction ( Ninth
Series) (Doubleday), Robert
P. Mills gives us sixteen
stories, a smattering of short
poems and an unfortunately
large number of flatulent
jokes in the “Adventures of
Ferdinand Feghoot” series.
The level is high, though the
Old Reliables on his list —
Heinlein, Tenn, Bester, Stur-
geon, Knight — mostly turn in
inferior performances. Hein-
lein’s “All You Zombies — ” is
a smoking room joke warped
into the semblance of a story ;
Tenn’s Eastward Ho! with
great labor nails down every
implication to be found in the
speculation that we may one
day have to give America

101

back to the Indians; Bester,
almost always brilliant, is in
The Psi Man only flashy ;
Sturgeon is opaque in his ex-
ercise in metafiction, The
Man Who Lost the Sea! and
only Knight’s What Rough
Beast? has the simultaneous
qualities of competence, power
and scope that we have a
right to expect from all of
these. In What Rough Beast?,
Knight creates what is prob-
ably his finest character, a
mutant— or perhaps a Mes-
siah— who can create worlds
and destroy them.

Good as it is, What Rough
Beast? may not be quite the
best story in the book. Two
powerful contenders are Dan-
iel Keyes’ Flowers for Alger-
non, the rise and fall of a
laboratory-produced super-
man, and R. M. McKenna’s
Casey Agonistes, a fantasy
laid in the terminal lung-dis-
ease ward of a V. A. hospital.
There are other attractive en-
tries by Jane Rice and Avram
Davidson, but there are also
half a dozen of the Feghoot
jokettes, in which some 150
words are used to enchain a
sitting duck, at which a gassy
pun is fired. (Sample: “Bards
of a fetter flog to get ’er,”
says Feghoot of a whipping
contest among pilloried poets
with a virgin as the prize.)

For comparison, Ace has
just reissued the Third Series
of the same, containing
stories by Farmer, Gresham,
de Camp-Pratt, Bester and

102

Boucher, among others. The
stories date from the series’
sugar-coated period. They are
charming, competent and
guaranteed roughage-free.
They are also quite forget-
table. It may be that even
Ferdinand Feghoot is not too
high a price to pay for prog-
ress.

OTHER reissues include
Robert A. Heinlein’s Me-
thuselah’s Children (Signet),
not the best of the future his-
tories but still a fine evening’s
reading. The first half is a
tightly plotted, carefully de-
tailed story of immortals
among humanity, with their
problems and plans. The sec-
ond, unhappily, becomes a
sort of wishy-washy travel-
ogue . . . Bantam has reissued
Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr.’s The
Stars Are Too High, a story
of a flying saucer which has
not even the virtue of extra-
terrestrial origin to relieve its
dullness. ... A more impres-
sive reprint is Tom Godwin’s
Space Prison (Pyramid),
which is his 1958 Gnome
Press novel, The Survivors.
Godwin imagines that a band
of interstellar pioneers, ma-
rooned on an almost uninhab-
itable planet by a conquering,
superpowerful race of aliens,
can in several centuries so im-
prove their physical strength
and resourcefulness as to gull,
trap and finally defeat these
aliens — first their scout ship
(with bare hands), ultimately

FREDERIK POHL

their whole blooming empire.
Now this is preposterous. Yet
Godwin miraculously brings it
all off. The people become
real. Their scrabbling battle
for survival excites compas-
sion and respect. And, when
they win, it is a most hard-
shelled reader who will not
rejoice.

Signet, under its new “Sig-
net Classics” imprint, has put
back in print sixteen fine
books. Bronte, Dickens, Tol-
stoy and such make up most
of their list, but among the
sixteen are Gulliver’s Travels,
Virginia Woolf’s delightful
and strange Orlando, and
George Orwell’s Animal
Farm. Each book contains a
critical or reminiscent intro-
duction or postscript, and the
packages are handsomely
dressed.

DO THEY esp or do they
cheat? In The Mind
Readers (Doubleday), S. G.
Soal and H. T. Bowden make
no bones about it: They say
their subjects esp. Said sub-
jects are a pair of Welsh
teen-agers with surly dispo-
sitions, a propensity for fak-
ing results when they think
they can get away with it and
a spy-proof secret code for
communication between them-
selves— the Welsh language,
“which few Englishmen can
ever learn.” Nevertheless,
their cheating seems to have
occurred at only one brief pe-
riod. (Youthful mischief?)

WORLDS OF IF

Their dispositions and their
bilingualism make the tests
more difficult but do not in-
validate them. And, over a se-
ries of more than 17,000
tests, the boys produced high-
er-than-chance recognition of
Rhine-type ESP cards with
astonishing reliability. These
were not mere squiggles on
the graph, six right, seven
right. These were 20 out of
25, 21 out of 25 — on two occa-
sions, 25 out of 25 trials !

As reading matter, the
book’s minutely pettifogging
precision of statement makes
it downright tiresome. A
redeeming human sidelight
comes in the collection of com-
mentaries by other parapsy-
chologists appended to the
book. J. B. Rhine was one of
those invited to comment ;
here, nettled, he thanks Dr.
Soal for the invitation. It is,
he says, “a compliment I ap-
preciate. I say this because,
in his private correspondence
and published statements over
the years, Dr. Soal has been,
at one stage or another, one
of the most harshly unfavour-
able (and, to my mind, un-
fair) among the critics of the
researches with which I have
been associated.” And Dr.
Soal’s own researches, Rhine
reflects, look “disproportion-
ately large to him and the
work of everyone else com-
paratively small and distorted
. . . But, I am inclined to
think, it may be that this very
capacity for intense pre-occu-

103

pation with one’s own inquiry
to the exclusion of everybody
else’s is necessary to this
man.”

IN Strange World of the
Moon (Basic Books), V. A.
Firsoff combines a scrupu-
lous reporting of virtually
every recorded fact about our
biggest and oldest satellite
with an equally scrupulous
but clearly mind-made-up
weighing of the theories that
explain them. The Moon did
not, he says, come out of the
basin of the Pacific. Its crat-
ers were not, he says, formed
either by meteorite impact or
by the flow of molten rock
from Earth-type volcanoes. It
was indeed something like
volcanic action that did it, he
says, but the differences are
so considerable that he will
not call the things “volcanoes”
at all, preferring the coined
word “lunavoes,” vents from
the Moon’s interior which re-
lease gas and a sort of warm-
ish mud.

Firsoff’s Moon is, as he
says, “a living world, (not)
the conventional idea of a ball
of terrestrial rocky desert
raised to a high atmospheric
level and made to revolve once
a month.” It is a world of
color (red, blue, green, violet,
brown and yellow have all
been observed) and of change
(features disappear, mark-
ings alter shape and color).
Firsoff has his own explana-
tions for much of these

curiosities, but he is also
faithful in transmitting the
theories put forth by others,
including Pickering’s conjec-
ture that the changes in
markings around the crater
Eratosthenes may be caused
by “ ‘small animals’ moving
at a rate of 6 inches per
hour.”

To the lay reader Firsoff
is most persuasive, and he is
gifted with the most pleasur-
able capacity for being both
complete and clear. Short of
tomorrow’s actual landings,
this is the best estimate we
can form of Luna, its terrain
and (so says Firsoff, again
fully persuasive) its very pos-
sible plant and animal life.

JOHN Brunner’s Slavers of
Space and Philip K. Dick’s
Dr. Futurity combine in an
Ace double volume of not
quite total merit. Brunner
starts with a pleasure-mad
Earth, amply fed and served
by colonies and robots. Earth-
men spend most of their time
in a wild carnival (described
with ingenuity) and are
viewed with great scorn by
the other worlds in the Gal-
axy (invented with thought
and originality). There are,
however, in addition to the
robots, certain blue-skinned
creatures called androids,
perfectly human in every re-
spect save color and a com-
plete deficiency of civil rights :
they can be killed, tortured,
enslaved. A son of an ex-

104

FREDERIK POHL

tremely wealthy Earth fam-
ily forsakes pleasure and
determines to end the abuses
of the android trade.

After some satisfactory ad-
ventures, though, Brunner’s
invention deserts him and the
story takes a “surprise” twist
which we cannot approve (as
flimsy) and may not discuss
(as giving away the payoff).

An analogous fault mars
Philip K. Dick’s equally in-
ventive Dr. Futurity. A 21st
century doctor is snatched by
a time machine into a still
farther future, the death-lov-
ing world of the year 2405,
where his healing skill is con-
sidered a foul perversion, and
he is at once entrapped into
a complicated net of under-
ground activities.

The death-lovers have been
constructed with attention to
those corroborative details
which give artistic verisimili-
tude, and thus Dick's narra-
tive is neither bald nor
unconvincing. It is quite con-
vincing. It is even hairy. What
flaws the story is a really ex-
cessive troweling-on of time
paradoxes, so that most every-
body turns out to be most any-
body else. ... In mediocre
stories neither of these end-
ings would do any great harm ;
but the bulk of these works is
very far above mediocre.

ANOTHER Ace double vol-
ume gives us a double
dose of Harlan Ellison. One
side is The Man with Nine

WORLDS OF IF

Lives, described as a “novel.”
It might more aptly be called
a bag of tricks. Its plot line is
complicated beyond any reas-
onable demand an author
might make on a reader, caus-
ing its hero to assume totally
irrelevant identities and work
toward totally unconnected
purposes, apparently for the
sake of using up some old
wordage lying around in the
form of unrelated novelettes.

The flip side is a collection
of small, violent short stories
under the title, A Touch of
Infinity. A feature of this col-
lection is the introductory
paragraph which Ellison has
written for each story, giving
us either insight into his
creative process (“It is al-
ways wise for the writer to
consciously haul himself up
short by the shift key and
write a change of pace
story”), a comment on the
vexed conflict between au-
thor and editor (“I let him
stick his own title on it, and
since it was better, anyhow,
what the hell”) or a glimpse
of the early struggles of the
artist (“Who the hell ever
thought I’d wind up making
my bread pounding a type-
writer?”). The stories them-
selves are light-years above
the novel on the other side.
With less rope, Ellison suc-
ceeds in getting less tangled,
and these are first-rate of
their type. Their type is blood
and thunder.

END

105

There couldn’t be a better
tip-off system than mine —
it wasn’t possible — but he
had one!

THE

NON-ELECTRONIC

Illustrated by MORROW

1 WOULDN’T take five cents
off a legitimate man, but if
they want to gamble that’s
another story.

What I am is a genius, and
I give you a piece of advice:
Do not ever play cards with a
stranger. The stranger might
be me. Where there are degen-
erate card players around I
sometimes get a call. Not dice
— I don’t have a machine to
handle them. But with cards I
have a machine to force the
advantage.

The first thing is a little
radio receiver, about the size
of a pack of cigarettes. You
don’t hear any music. You
feel it on your skin. The next

106

By E. MITTLEMAN

thing is two dimes. You stick
them onto you, anywhere you
like. Some like to put them on
their legs, some on their belly.
Makes no difference, just so
they’re out of sight. Each dime
has a wire soldered to it, and
the wires are attached to the
little receiver that goes in
your pocket.

The other thing is the trans-
mitter I carry around.

My partner was a fellow
named Henry. He had an elec-
tronic surplus hardware busi-
ness, but business wasn’t good
and he was looking for a little
extra cash on the side. It turns
out that the other little whole-
salers in the loft building

where he has his business are
all card players, and no pik-
ers, either. So Henry spread
the word that he was available
for a gin game — any time at
all, but he would only play in
his own place — he was expect-
ing an important phone call
and he didn’t want to be away
and maybe miss it. . . . It never
came; but the card players
did.

I was suposed to be his stock
clerk. While Henry and the
other fellow were working on
the cards at one end of the
room, I would be moving
around the other — checking
the stock, packing the stuff for
shipment, arranging it on the
shelves, sweeping the floor. I
was a regular model worker,
busy every second. I had to be.
In order to see the man’s hand
I had to be nearby, but I had
to keep moving so he wouldn’t
pay attention to me.

And every time I got a look
at his hand, I pushed the little
button on the transmitter in
my pocket.

Every push on the button
was a shock on Henry’s leg.
One for spades, two for hearts,
three for diamonds, four for
clubs.

Then I would tip the card:
a short shock for an ace, two
for a king, three for a queen,
and so on down to the ten. A
long and a short for nine, a
long and two shorts for an
eight ... it took a little mem-
orizing, but it was worth it.
Henry knew every card the

other man held every time.
And I got fifty per cent.

WE DIDN’T annihilate the
fish. They hardly felt
they were being hurt, but we
got a steady advantage, day
after day. We did so well we
took on another man — I can
take physical labor or leave it
alone, and I leave it alone
every chance I get.

That was where we first felt
the trouble.

Our new boy was around
twenty. He had a swept-wing
haircut, complete with tail
fins. Also he had a silly laugh.
Now, there are jokes in a card
game — somebody taking a
beating will sound off, to take
away some of the sting, but
nobody laughs because the
cracks are never funny. But
they were to our new boy.

He laughed.

He laughed not only when
the mark made some crack,
but a lot of the time when he
didn’t. It got so the customers
were looking at him with a lot
of dislike, and that was bad
for business.

So I called him out into the
hall. “Skippy,” I said — that’s
what we called him, “lay off.
Never rub it in to a sucker.
It’s enough to take his
money.”

He ran his fingers back
along his hair. “Can’t a fel-
low express himself?”

I gave him a long, hard un-
healthy look. Express him-
self? He wouldn’t have to. I’d

107

express him myself— express
him right out of our setup.

But before I got a chance,
this fellow from Chicago came
in, a big manufacturer named
Chapo ; a wheel, and he looked
it. He was red-faced, with
hanging jowls and a big dol-
lar cigar; he announced that
he only played for big stakes
. . . and, nodding toward the
kid and me, that he didn’t
like an audience.

Henry looked at us miser-
ably. But what was he going
to do? If he didn’t go along,
the word could spread that
maybe there was something
wrong going on. He had to
play. “Take the day off, you
two,” he said, but he wasn’t
happy.

I thought fast.

There was still one chance.
I got behind Chapo long
enough to give Henry a wink
and a nod toward the win-
dow. Then I took Skippy by
the elbow and steered him out
of there.

Down in the street I said,
fast: “You want to earn your
pay? You have to give me a
hand — an eye is really what
I mean. Don’t argue — just
say yes or no.”

He didn’t stop to think.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

“All right;” I took him
down the street to where they
had genuine imported Japa-
nese field glasses and laid out
twenty bucks for a pair. The
man was a thief, but I didn’t
have time to argue. Right

108

across the street from Henry’s
place was a rundown hotel.
That was our next stop.

The desk man in the scratch
house looked up from his com-
ic book. “A room,” I said.
“Me and my nephew want a
room facing the street.” And
I pointed to the window of
Henry’s place, where I wanted
it to face.

Because we still had a
chance. With the field glasses
and Skippy’s young, good eyes

E. MITTLEMAN

to look through them, with All the time I was wonder-
the transmitter that would ing how many hands were

carry an extra hundred yards being played, if we were stuck

easy enough — with everything money and how much — all

going for us, we had a chance, kinds of things. But finally we

Provided Henry had been able got into the room and I laid

to maneuver Chapo so his back it out for Skippy. “You aim

was to the window. those field glasses out the win-

The bed merchant gave us dow,” I told him. “Read

a long stall about how the only Chapo’s cards and let me

room we wanted belonged to know ; that’s all. I’ll take care

a sweet old lady that was sick of the rest.”

and couldn’t be moved. But for I’ll say this for him, duck-
ten bucks she could be. tail haircut and all, he set-

tied right down to business. I
made myself comfortable on
the bed and rattled them off
on the transmitter as he read
the cards to me. I couldn’t see
the players, didn’t know the
score; but if he was giving
the cards to me right, I was
getting them out to Henry.

I felt pretty good. I even be-
gan to feel kindly toward the
kid. At my age, bifocals are
standard equipment, but to
judge from Skippy ’s fast, sure
call of the cards, his eyesight
was twenty-twenty or better.

After about an hour, Skippy
put down the glasses and broke
the news : the game was over.

We took our time getting
back to Henry’s place, so
Chapo would have time to clear
out. Henry greeted us with
eight fingers in the air.

Eight hundred? But before
I could ask him, he was already
talking: “Eight big ones!

Eight thousand bucks! And
how you did it, I’ll never
know!”

Well, eight thousand was
good news, no doubt of that.
I said, “That’s the old system,
Henry. But we couldn’t have
done it if you hadn’t steered
the fish up to the window.”
And I showed him the Japa-
nese field glasses, grinning.

But he didn’t grin back. He
looked puzzled. He glanced to-
ward the window.

I looked too, and then I saw
what he was puzzled about. It
was pretty obvious that Henry
had missed my signal. He and

110

the fish had played by the win-
dow, all right.

But the shade was down.

WHEN I turned around to
look for Skippy, to ask
him some questions, he was
gone. Evidently he didn’t want
to answer.

I beat up and down every
block in the neighborhood un-
til I spotted him in a beanery,
drinking a cup of coffee and
looking worried.

I sat down beside him, quiet.
He didn’t look around. The
counterman opened his mouth
to say hello. I shook my head,
but Skippy said, “That’s all
right. I know you’re there.”

I blinked. This was a creep !
But I had to find out what was
going on. I said, “You made a
mistake, kid.”

“Running out?” He shrug-
ged. “It’s not the first mistake
I made,” he said bitterly. “Get-
ting into your little setup with
the bugged game came before
that.”

I said, “You can always
quit,” but then stopped. Be-
cause it was a lie. He couldn’t
quit — not until I found out how
he read Chapo’s cards through
a drawn shade.

He said drearily, “You’ve
all got me marked lousy, have-
n’t you? Don’t kid me about
Henry — I know. I’m not so
sure about you, but it wouldn’t
surprise me.”

“What are you talking
about?”

“I can hear every word

E. MITTLEMAN

that’s on Henry’s mind,” he
said somberly. “You, no. Some
people I can hear, some I can’t ;
you’re one I can’t.”

“What kind of goofy talk is
that?” I demanded. But, to tell
you the truth, I didn’t think
it was so goofy. The window
shade was a lot goofier.

“All my life,” said Skippy,
“I’ve been hearing the voices.
It doesn’t matter if they talk
out loud or not. Most people I
can hear, even when they don’t
want me to. Field glasses? I
didn’t need field glasses. I
could hear every thought that
went through Chapo’s mind,
clear across the street. Henry
too. That’s how I know.” He
hesitated, looking at me. “You
think Henry took eight thous-
and off Chapo, don’t you? It
was ten.”

I said, “Prove it.”

The kid finished his coffee.
“Well,” he said, “you want to
know what the counterman’s
got on his mind?” He leaned
over and whispered to me.

I yelled, “That’s a lousy
thing to say !”

Everybody was looking at
us. He said softly, “You see
what it’s like? I don’t want to
hear all this stuff! You think
the counterman’s got a bad
mind, you ought to listen in
on Henry’s.” He looked along
the stools. “See that fat little
woman down at the end? She’s
going to order another cheese
Danish.”

He hadn’t even finished
talking when the woman was

THE NON-ELECTRONIC BUG

calling the counterman, and
she got another cheese Danish.
I thought it over. What he
said about Henry holding out
on me made it real serious. I
had to have more proof.

But I didn’t like Skippy’s
idea of proof. He offered to
call off what everybody in the
beanery was going to do next,
barring three or four he said
were silent, like me. That was-
n’t good enough. “Come along
with me,” I told him, and we
took off for Jake’s spot.

That’s a twenty-four-hour
place and the doorman knows
me. I knew Jake and I knew
his roulette wheel was gaffed.
I walked right up to the wheel,
and whispered to the kid,
“Can you read the dealer?”
He smiled and nodded. “All
right. Call black or red.”

The wheel spun, but that
didn’t stop the betting. Jake’s
hungry. In his place you can
still bet for a few seconds
after the wheel starts turn-
ing.

“Black,” Skippy said.

I threw down fifty bucks.
Black it was.

That rattled me.

“Call again,” I said.

When Skippy said black, I
put the fifty on red. Black won
it.

“Let’s go,” I said, and led
the kid out of there.

He was looking puzzled.
“How come — ”

“How come I played to
lose?” I patted his shoulder.
“Sonny, you got a lot to learn.

Ill

Jake’s is no fair game. This
was only a dry run.”

Then I got rid of him, be-
cause I had something to do.

HENRY came across. He
even looked embarrassed.
“I figured,” he said, “uh, I
figured that the expenses — ”
“Save it,” I told him. “All
I want is my split.”

He handed it over, but I
kept my hand out, waiting.
After a minute he got the idea.
He reached down inside the
waistband of his pants, pulled
loose the tape that held the
dimes to his skin and handed
over the radio receiver.
“That’s it, huh?” he said.
“That’s it.”

“Take your best shot,” he
said glumly. “But mark my
words. You’re not going to
make out on your own.”

“I won’t be on my own,” I
told him, and left him then.
By myself? Not a chance! It
was going to be Skippy and
me, all the way. Not only
could he read minds, but the
capper was that he couldn’t
read mine ! Otherwise, you
can understand, I might not
want him around all the time.

But this way I had my own
personal bug in every game in
town, and I didn’t even have
to spend for batteries. Card
games, gaffed wheels, every-
thing. Down at the track he
could follow the smart-money
guys around and let me know
what they knew, which was
plenty. We could even go up

against the legit games in
Nevada, with no worry about
bluffs.

And think of the fringe
benefits! With Skippy giving
the women a preliminary
screening, I could save a lot
of wasted time. At my age,
time is nothing to be wasted.

I could understand a lot
about Skippy now — why he
didn’t like most people, why
he laughed at jokes nobody
else thought were funny, or
even could hear. But every-
body has got to like somebody,
and I had the edge over most
of the human race. He didn’t
know what I was thinking.

And then, take away the
voices in his head, and Skippy
didn’t have much left. He
wasn’t very smart. If he had
half as much in the way of
brains as he did in the way of
private radar, he would have
figured all these angles out for
himself long ago. No, he need-
ed me. And I needed him. We
were all set to make a big
score together, so I went back
to his rooming house where
I’d told him to wait, to get
going on the big time.

However, Henry had more
brains than Skippy,

I hadn’t told Henry who
tipped me off, but it didn’t
take him long to work out.
After all, I had told him I was
going out to look for Skippy,
and I came right back and
called him for holding out. No,
it didn’t take much brains. All
he had to do was come around

112

E. MITTLEMAN

to Skippy’s place and give him
a little lesson about talking.

So when I walked in the
door, Skippy was there, but
he was out cold, with lumps
on his forehead and a stupid
grin on his face. I woke him
up and he recognized me.

But you don’t make your
TV set play better by kicking
it. You don’t help a fine Swiss
watch by pounding it on an
anvil. Skippy could walk and
talk all right, but something
was missing. “The voices !” he
yelled, sitting up on the edge
of the bed.

I got a quick attack of cold
fear. “Skippy! What’s the
matter? Don’t you hear them
any more?”

He looked at me in a panic.
“Oh, I hear them all right. But
they’re all different now. I
mean — it isn’t English any
more. In fact, it isn’t any lan-
guage at all!”

LIKE I say, I’m a genius.

Skippy wouldn’t lie to me ;
he’s not smart enough. If he
says he hears voices, he hears
voices.

Being a genius, my theory
is that when Henry worked
Skippy over, he jarred his
tuning strips, or whatever it
is, so now Skippy’s receiving
on another frequency. Make
sense? I’m positive about it.

He sticks to the same story,
telling me about what he’s
hearing inside his head, and
he’s too stupid to make it all
up.

There are some parts of it
I don't have all figured out yet,
but I’ll get them. Like what he
tells me about the people — I
guess they’re people — whose
voices he hears. They’re
skinny and furry and very re-
ligious. He can’t understand
their language, but he gets
pictures from them, and he
told me what he saw. They
worship the Moon, he says.
Only that’s wrong too, be-
cause he says they worship
two moons, and everybody
knows there’s only one. But
I’ll figure it out ; I have to, be-
cause I have to get Skippy
back in business.

Meanwhile it’s pretty lone-
some. I spend a lot of time
down around the old neigh-
borhood, but I haven’t set
up another partner for taking
the card players. That seems
like pretty small stuff now.
And I don’t talk to Henry
when I see him. And I never
go in the beanery when that
counterman is on duty. I’ve
got enough troubles in the
world ; I don’t have to add to
them by associating with his
kind.

END

THE NON-ELECTRONIC BUG

113

The Arctic Sea was deadly

in every way —

MURDER

BENEATH

THE

POLAR

ICE

its icy water , crushing ice,<
avid beasts.

Still something there
was more lethal than these !

By HAYDEN HOWARD

Illustrated by GAUGHAN

WAVELETS of cigarette
smoke drifted across the
comfortably lounging enlisted
men in the air-conditioned
compartment of the Fleet Bal-
listic Missile submarine, as
they sat watching Barney.
Sweat streaming from his
swollen-veined forehead, hur-
ried and grotesque in his black
rubber diving suit, exploding
triumphant curses like under-;
water demolition charges,
Barney finished tightening the
control cables of what resem-
bled a torpedo with two open
cockpits. “This time the little1

114

gal raises her hydroplanes!”

At this contrast of men, the
Murderer had to grin, but
carefully in order not to sweat
and ruin the insulating quali-
ties of his three woolen layers
of longjohns. The submariners
seemed quiet-talking and coop-
erative, as well adjusted as
sardines in a can. The diver,
Barney, was foul-mouthed and
fiercely individualistic, a won-
derful guy — his diving buddy.

A legend in his own time,
Barney was reputed to have
arisen from the mine-strewn
waters of the Korean coast at
the time of the Wonsan-In-
chon landings to give advice
to General MacArthur.

As an TJnderwater Demoli-
tion Team diver, Barney dated
clear back into the Murderer’s
childhood recollections of
World War II, to dim names
like Kwajalein and Guam,
where former Seabees became
combat divers to wire and
blast Japanese underwater ob-
stacles and leave welcoming
signs for the Marines.

Barney was only quiet
about two things, his age and
his circumference. He still
fancied himself a baseball
catcher, and his stubby fingers
showed the deleterious effects
of grabbing at foul tips with
a bare hand, but those same
fingers could expertly repair
a wristwatch and the auto-
matic transmission of an ad-
miral’s car and hock one and
"borrow” the other.

Barney had managed to put

his homely younger sister
through college and was now
maneuvering to marry her off
to a lieutenant commander on
the staff of Admiral Rickover.
And he could expertly joke the
fears out of his diving buddy.

Winking at his comfortably
smoke-filled audience, Barney
dumped a sack of non-mag-
netic tools into the forward
cockpit of the minisub he per-
sonally had built, and cocked
his head.

“Murderer, here, is hoping
the villain is a sea serpent.
Don’t laugh, you sea horses.
The latest scuttlebutt from
Alaska has it that every time
a picket buoy goes dead out
here under the ice, the last
sound it broadcasts is a sort
of toothy crunch.”

HE pushed the joke a little
further. “Turn your per-
iscopes on the blade Mur-
derer’s wearing! John Paul
Jones used to issue those for
cutlasses! Murderer’s hoping
to fight the sea serpent hand
to hand.”

His grin widening with em-
barrassment, the Murderer
felt called upon to retort. “I’ll
give you a better suspect for
stealing our picket buoys. San-
ta Claus. These are his terri-
torial waters. Are you aware
that in the Middle Ages Santa
Claus was the patron saint of
thieves?”

“Now, Mr. College Boy,”
Barney began, "you just want
to show us you also studied

115

history, not just marine bi-
ology. This boy will even tell
you a long Latin name for a
little something that floats
like dandruff in the water.”
A touch of pride appeared in
Barney’s voice. “He can tell
you its whole life history and
what eats it and why it’s im-
portant and why it will be a
lot more important fifty years
from now when your kids will
need a lot more food from the
sea.”

There was a perceptible
slowing, and the weird sound
from the atomic submarine’s
heat-exchanger muted. Barney
glanced at his pressure-proof
watch. The Murderer tensed.

“This college boy may look
like a tennis player,” Barney
went on as if nothing had
happened, “but in the water,
when Murderer sees some-
thing swimming down there,
he doesn’t care how big it is.
We were installing the broad-
cast aerial from a picket buoy
up through ice, and Murderer
had just retracted the mag-
nesium flare pole, so I’m half-
blinded. I look down. I see
something so big I want to
get out of there on a bicycle.
But down Murderer swims
with the magnesium flare in
one hand and his cutlass in
the other. It’s a shark as big
as a small whale. The flare
hypnotizes it, and round and
round they go, with Murderer
stabbing away, letting in sea
water until that shark bugs
out of there like a bare-bot-

116

tomed boy from a swarm of
bumblebees !”

The Murderer studied his
depth gauge to cover his em-
barrassment. The reason the
shark had been so big was that
it belonged to a species with
the whale-like habit of strain-
ing the water for minute
crustaceans. It was harmless
and had winced from his first
thrust. Then its shagreen hide
had tensed to armor-tough-
ness, and it had been like try-
ing to stab a submarine. It
left because it had no reason
to stay.

“I’m relieved," one of the
submariners laughed, “that
stabbing fish is how he got
the name Murderer.”

“Not only fish,” Barney
went on enthusiastically.
“This boy almost got himself
court-martialed. We’re work-
ing from the icebreaker, out
from Point Barrow, diving
from a whaleboat, and before
the Annapolis ensign can say
a word Murderer’s over the
side. We put our face-plates
in the water. He’s bubbling
down on a walrus! I swear,
he rides it like a bucking
horse. You need a long blade
in the arctic. And ugly —
when we bent a cable to that
walrus from the icebreaker,
the walrus stalled the winch !”
“What about tusks ?” a sub-
mariner’s voice asked.

THE Murderer had been
well aware of tusks. For
three days he had been study-

HAYDEN HOWARD

ing the walrus herd with fas-
cination. These staring-eyed,
noisy mammals were living in
icy water that would numb
and kill a man in a few min-
utes.

Some of them were diving
to clam beds more than two
hundred and fifty feet down,
where their bodies were sub-
jected to a pressure of more
than eight atmospheres. In
shallower water where cock-
les predominated, he had actu-
ally observed them raking the
muddy bottom with their
tusks and rising with great
disintegrating masses of mud
and shells between their flip-
pers. Few men had ever seen
that.

He marveled at the evolu-
tionary process by which some
primitive land mammal of the
Eocene Period had become the
walrus.

WHY he had swum down
and attacked a walrus,
he did not know. Afterward
he felt ashamed, not just be-
cause it was a dumb thing
to do and he’d had three ribs
cracked and should have been
killed; not because it was a
show-off thing, with sailors
urging him to stand in front
of its hoisted body so they
could take pictures for their
girl friends ; not because
Barney lost his appetite for
a couple of days and didn’t
seem very eager to dive near
the herd. What bothered him
was the indescribable feeling

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE

he’d had as he swam down
with his knife to the walrus,
a feeling closer than hun-
ger.. .

“When we get back. I’ll
show you the photographs,”
Barney was insisting proudly.
“When they assigned this boy
as my diving buddy, they sent
his name along. Murderer. If
it swims. Murderer will go
down after it, they said. And
they weren’t lying.”

But that was not how the
name originated. Sitting there
in the drifting cigarette
smoke, feeling the sweat soak
through his longjohns, the
Murderer wished the sub-
marine’s commander would
hurry up and decide on a po-
sition, let them out of the boat,
get it over with.

Probably by now, even the
guys who were in U.D.T.
training with him believed he
got the name by murdering
fish.

They gave the name to
him, but it was during an ori-
entation meeting with dia-
grams and graphs and talk of
megatons and current-borne
radioactivity and a model of
an atomic depth charge on the
table. An incredulous revul-
sion had come over him, this
mindlessly mechanical can of
death that could poison, could
make useless two billion strug-
gling years of life, all wasted,
single-celled ancestors, di-
atoms, copepods, wondrous
fish.

During the discussion, he

117

had kept exclaiming: “It’s
murder! It's murder!” This
was how he had acquired his
name.

“Hey, Murderer,” one of the
submariners laughed. “You
should cut off a sea serpent
steak for the skipper. I bet
he’d go for one.”

“Speaking of murderers,”
the Murderer blurted, sud-
denly detesting the name,
raising his clean-cut, angrily
intelligent face, flooding his
longjohns with angry sweat,
“you all are potential mur-
derers— on a big scale. Let’s
say ten thousand victims
apiece. I kill a few fish, so I’m
a murderer? But you are all
gears and cogs of a mass pro-
duction murder mechanism
called a Fleet Ballistic Missile
submarine. An impersonal
machine that — ”

“Not impersonal,” the com-
mander’s voice said clearly as
he came into the compart-
ment. “This boat is just an-
other tool f or survival — like a
shield or spear. Men make the
decisions for it.”

BARNEY said in an attempt
to ease the tension, “You
want us to bring you any ice
cubes, Commander?”

The commander’s gray eyes
studied Barney’s red-veined
ones. “Just bring yourselves
back, Barney. We’ll settle for
that.” He touched the mini-
sub. “All I can say is we think
we’re in the sector where the
picket buoys shorted out.

118

There’ve been such meager
appropriations for hydro-
graphic surveys in the Arctic
Ocean, we haven’t a very clear
picture of fathometer land-
marks even in this sector. So
the navigator has depended
pretty heavily on his dead reck-
oning and inertial navigation.
What I’m getting at is don’t
spend too much time looking.
Use conservative search pat-
terns. Give yourself plenty of
margin to find your way home
to us. We’ll do our best to hold
this position.”

Slowly, the commander
smiled. “We’ll keep the coffee
hot until you get back.”

The Murderer watched
them roll the minisub along on
its cradle and into the
chamber. From the stem, the
minisub looked less like a tor-
pedo. Instead of the compact
round propeller blades associ-
ated with high speeds under
water, the minisub had long
narrow blades which might
have looked more appropriate
on a Wright Brother’s air-
plane. These would unwind
through the water so slowly
there would be no cavitation,
no tell-tale bubbling sounds.

“One last thing,” the com-
mander said, including the
Murderer in his gray gaze.
“No aggressive action. If you
should meet — someone — break
off contact in a dignified man-
ner and come home.”

Strangely, the commander
smiled again and glanced at
his watch. “Right about now,

HAYDEN HOWARD

my two kids are waking from
their afternoon naps and run-
ning out into the backyard in
their underpants to swing on
the swings. No aggressive ac-
tion, O.K.?”

The Murderer felt thankful
he was not the commander —
with the responsibility for
sixteen hydrogen-warheaded
Polaris missiles on his back.

Weighted down by his air
tanks, the Murderer crawled
into the chamber beside the
minisub and reached into the
stern cockpit. He unreeled a
few feet of the red wire and
plugged it into the chest socket
of his electric suit warmer.
Out there, you couldn’t search
very long without battery heat
from the minisub.

Automatically checking his
full-face mask, he connected
with the black wire and tested
his throat mike, earplug cir-
cuit. “One — two — three — ”

“Four — shut the door,”
Barney’s voice croaked weird-
ly. For complicated two-man
disassemblies underwater, the
traditional hand signals were
not enough. The minisub acted
as a telephone exchange.

TURNING from the mini-
sub, Barney plugged into
the telephone connection in
the wall of the chamber, giv-
ing them the word. From the
way the Arctic Ocean fire-
hosed into the chamber, the
Murderer guessed they had at
least a hundred feet of water
standing on them. This cap-

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE

tain had no intention of
smashing his periscopes on
pack ice.

Wryly, the Murderer grin-
ned while the water crept up
his body. He knew the limiting
factor in their search for a
picket buoy, any picket buoy,
was the survival time in their
air tanks. As for the mini-
sub, it had the capability of
keeping their corpses warm
for several hours thereafter.
With its gyroscope efficiently
clicking commands to the rud-
der, it would maintain a
straighter course than any
man could steer. If it could
eat fish and reproduce it-
self . . .

The waterline rose above
his glass face-plate. On the
curved ceilings of the cham-
ber, the air shrank into a
squirming bubble. The pres-
sure had been equalized.
There was a cold metallic
screech as Barney opened the
outer hatch into the Arctic
Ocean.

Valving an additional hiss
of compressed air into the
minisub’s forward flotation
tank, the Murderer gave it a
gentle push and rode it out,
his hand on the air release
valve now to prevent the in-
creasingly buoyant minisub
from falling upward against
the white-glaring underside of
the ice pack.

“There’s a hell of a current
up here,” Barney’s voice
croaked.

The Murderer glanced

119

down, and his free arm clutch-
ed the cockpit in an anthro-
poidal fear-reflex of falling.
The water was that clear.
Down there, the submarine
seemed to drift away like a
great dirigible in the wind,
but the Murderer knew the
minisub was actually doing
the drifting.

“Tinker carefully with your
gyroscope, Mr. Navigator,”
Barney laughed, “and we’ll go
take a look for your sea ser-
pent.”

He gave Barney a straight
course into the current. The
Murderer had had nightmares
of being lost under the arctic
ice pack.

“Keep an eye peeled on the
ice,” Barney muttered, but
the Murderer kept both eyes
on the instruments and gave
Barney a one-hundred-eighty-
degree change of course, try-
ing to determine the speed of
the current.

“One way’s as good as an-
other,” Barney laughed.

Unfortunately, this had to
be a visual search. The draw-
ing-board boys had designed
the picket buoys so they
would not be detected, and
thoughtfully made them self-
destroying in case they were.
If anywhere near, a subma-
rine would be recorded, and
the under-ice warning system
had actually worked against
their own submarines. But the
picket buoys in this sector, one
by one, had died without a
warning sound except, as scut-

120

tlebutt would have it, a toothy
crunch.

“This pack ice has changed,”
Barney’s voice muttered.

Barney and the Murderer
had been one of the diving
teams out there when a sub-
marine ejected the buoys be-
neath the polar ice. A buoy
would squirt from a torpedo
tube. When the non-magnetic
float struck the underside of
the ice. metal rods clutched
upward like the legs of a
spider clinging to the ice. A
thread-like cable lowered the
tiny instrument capsule into
the depths. The capsule’s
small size was intended to foil
typical mine detection sonar,
while the float was supposed
to merge with irregularities of
sonic reflection on the under-
side of the ice. Some admiral
had even ordered the floats
painted white, but they still
cut off light and appeared
dark from beneath the ice.

AFTER the divers had melt-
ed a quick hole through
two or three feet of pack ice
and extended the whip-like
aerial into the polar air, head-
quarters could keep track of
the drifting buoy’s location.
Intermittently, for the classi-
fied number of years the bat-
teries were supposed to last,
each buoy would broadcast its
own identification code, only
coming through with a high
wattage warning when its in-
strument capsule in the depths
of the Arctic Ocean was awak-

HAYDEN HOWARD

MURDER BENEATH THE POUR ICE

ened. The joker here, the Mur-
derer thought, was that the
aerials might be hard to see,
but any simple fool could
make himself a radio location
finder. Live buoys could be
hunted from the surface ice.

“How dry I am,” Barney’s
voice croaked unmusically,
“how dry I be, nobody knows
— nobody cares — ”

Now the white underside
of the ice drooped in down-
ward bulges, indicating thick-
er masses of old ice that had
been frozen into the pack. The
Murderer saw the gray outline
of driftwood entombed in this
old ice.

“Drift ice from the Siberian
rivers,” Barney croaked.
“When we planted the picket
buoys, our sector didn’t have
any of this.”

The Murderer looked down
at his instruments, preparing
to change course.

“My God, look!” Barney’s
voice croaked, and his black
rubber arm pointed upward.

The Murderer’s breathing
stopped as he made out some-
thing quivering up there.
“What is it?”

“Animal, vegetable or min-
eral,” Barney wheezed. “If it’s
animal, I don’t want to be
around when whatever laid
these eggs comes back.”

Swaying up there on the
underside of the ice in a ge-
latinous mass at least twenty
feet across, it resembled a
mass of gigantic frog’s eggs.

But the Murderer decided

122

there was too great a varia-
tion in size for them to be
eggs. Those nearest the out-
side of the mass seemed clear-
er, more transparent, than the
surrounding gelatinous sub-
stance. The Murderer’s excite-
ment began to fade.

“They’re not eggs,” he
said disappointedly. “I think
they’re only bubbles encased
in some sort of soft plastic.”

“Mineral,” Barney said
with some relief in his voice.
“Now I see that dark part in
the middle has the shape of a
can. The bubbles must be to
float a mine or secret mecha-
nism,” his voice ended excited-
ly. Barney wanted nothing to
do with live things; he liked
mechanical devices that click-
ed and buzzed and could be
taken apart and then put back
together.

He eased the minisub up to-
ward the gelatinous mass.

“Don’t bring the minisub
too close,” the Murderer gasp-
ed, imagining a mechanical
click as the impersonal gadg-
etry within the can detected
their approach and cocked the
lifeless steel prongs of a deto-
nator.

Barney laughed in excited
contrast. “Even our air tanks
are non-magnetic. Or if it’s
hydrophonic, the noise level to
set it off would have to be
plenty high, because of all the
crunching sounds every day
in the ice. I’m going to find out
what it is.”

Barney rose from his cock-

HAYDEN HOWARD

Behind all science fiction is
a stranger-than-fiction
science truth. Stimulus is a
dynamic new book for the
intelligent layman, with a dramatic
analysis of the facts of science
today--and an enlightened
projection into the mystery
of science tomorrow . . .
The nation’s leading science
authorities are writing STIMULUS
now, for the aware layman,
student, or technical man.
The colorfully illustrated, hard-
cover volume contains chapters
on space technology, basic
research, energy and civilization,
and psychology in today’s industry.
It discusses the past, present,
and future history of rocketry;
the power of the seas; machines
that perceive; and many other
exciting subjects which provide
the key to understanding the
present and future of "science.
Order stimulus for $4.95 now.

( normally $6.75.)

STIMULUS— the perfect gift for the
science-minded — proves truth
really is stranger than fiction.

Stimulus is published by industrial
research — a bimonthly magazine
for creative engineers and executives
in all fields of science.
If you subscribe now to INDUSTRIAL
research , you'll be able to take
advantage of a free STIMULUS
with a 3 year subscription.

pit, trailing his green-stained
canvas bag of non-magnetic
tools.

“You’re not going to cut
into it, are you?” the Murder-
er cried.

“That’s what the taxpayers
pay me for — to protect them
from — you name it. Murderer,
you sail the minisub off until
all my telephone cable is out.
Just like when we practiced
disarming our picket buoys,
I’ll tell you every move I
make w

“If it’s a mine,” the Mur-
derer said, “I’ll be as flattened
as you.”

“Take notes on your naviga-
tional pad. I’ll start with a
little experimental cut into the
jello. We can’t go off and leave
this thing; we’d never find it
again. And it wouldn’t be ex-
actly smart to tow it to our
submarine until we know
what its insides are supposed
to do.”

BARNEY’S black rubber
arm was sawing vigorous-
ly up and down. “This jello’s
tougher than it looks. Very
ingenious. I’ll bet this was a
compact little bundle when a
submarine ejected it into the
water. Probably sea water
makes it swell — and chemi-
cals fizz inside so that the
bubbles appear and float the
can up to the underside of
the ice.

“This is important,” Bar-
ney’s voice croaked on. “I’ve
come to some thin shiny wires.

124

They seem to be all through
the jello and to curve back in
toward the can.”

The Murderer clenched his
hand. He could feel the ten-
dons and imagine the wonder-
fully intricate nerves of his
living hand. He’d been fright-
ened many times under the
sea. Occasionally divers talk-
ed about which way they’d
rather go. Nitrogen narcosis
was popular among the heavy
drinkers. Barney’s choice — a
nice close mine explosion be-
cause it would be so quick.
They thought the Murderer
was crazy when he said he’d
rather be eaten by a Great
White Shark than smashed
by some miserable explosive
gadget.

“Now I’m spreading two
wires apart,” Barney said
calmly, “but I’ve left a layer
of gelatin around each of
them. I will not cut the wires
and I’ll try not to let them
touch eaeh other.”

Gradually his head and
shoulders disappeared up into
the gelatinous mass.

“Don’t snag your tanks or
regulator on a wire,” the Mur-
derer breathed.

“Now I’m cutting within a
few inches of the base of the
can.” Only Barney’s kicking
legs showed. “My air is filling
the cut — and I’m going — to
open a — chimney.” Bubbles
emerged from the side of the
swaying mass.

“Suppose this thing is
atomic,” the Murderer said.

HAYDEN HOWARO

“It would crush our ballistic
missile sub from here.”

“This is peacetime, boy. No-
body’s fool enough to let an
atomic mine go drifting
around with the ice.”

The Murderer looked down
at the hard metal shell of the
minisub. You could blast and
smash it, and it would still be
metal. You even could vapor-
ize it, and its atomic parti-
cles would be somewhere — or
changed into energy — but
nothing really lost, because it
had never been alive. The
Murderer thought of the com-
mander’s two kids waking
from their naps. It had taken
life two billion years to get
that far, and it all could be
lost. Right now, was Barney
committing aggressive action?

He thought again of that
orientation class where they
theoretically learned how to
disarm an unexploded atomic
depth charge. He had express-
ed his feeling that these atom-
ic charges were murder. The
fools had laughed and begun
calling him Murderer.

“The bottom of this can is
as blank,” Barney said, “as a
sailor in one of those modem
art museums. I’m going to cut
my way along the side of the
can and see what I can see.”

A little fish, perhaps lost
from its school, peered into
the Murderer’s glass face-
plate. Its wondrous eye grew
inquisitively larger, and he
thought of the millions of co-
operating cells that made up

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE

its eye and optic nerve and
receiving brain and the mar-
vel that the individually drift-
ing cells of two billion years
ago could have achieved this.

There was a contradiction,
he thought. He was amazed by
life and yet he speared fish.
Did he enjoy feeling life wrig-
gle on the end of his spear?

“I’ve reached the top,” Bar-
ney’s voice croaked. “There’s a
rod here — get this, a vertical
rod. It extends up into the ice
like with the aerials of our
picket buoys. I knew it wasn’t
a mine. This is how they plan
to detect our atomic subma-
rines. This will make a very
interesting present for Ad-
miral Rickover — ”

At this instant there was
a darkening slap against the
Murderer’s mask. His ear-
drums burst inward. His in-
testines squeezed up into his
chest from the force of the
underwater explosion. He
blacked out.

ICE water seared his face.

He was drowning. Convul-
sively, his hand groped for his
mask. The glass was intact.
His hand dragged the mask
back to a proper fit upon his
face, and compressed air forc-
ed out the sea water. He could
feel the telephone cord pulling
at his mask.

Everything was blinding
white, and he realized he was
belly up beneath the ice. “Bar-
ney?”

The telephone wire began

125

to drag him down head first,
and he went down it hand
over hand toward the slowly
sinking minisub. “Barney?”
Further down, he saw Bar-
ney’s black rubber suit
spread-eagled and sinking,
and he swam clumsily down
past the minisub. He clutched
Barney’s black rubber arm
and dragged it toward the
minisub. The black rubber suit
seemed to have no bones.
Everything drooped and sway-
ed as he tried to fit Barney
into the stern cockpit. When
he wrapped Barney’s wires to
tie him in, they came face to
face. There was no glass in
Barney’s mask. The glass had
burst where the face had been.

Barney’s death.

Dragging himself into Bar-
ney’s forward cockpit, he valv-
ed air into the minisub’s
forward flotation tank, raising
the torpedo-like nose. It was
then that he saw them up
there, silhouetted small and
frog-like against the blinding
white ice, two divers.

The two silhouettes were
looking down at him, and he
knew they had been attracted
by the explosion of their gelat-
inous picket buoy. He looked
all around for the dim gray
outline of their submarine, but
there was no sign of their
“home,” and his gaze concen-
trated with wide-eyed inten-
sity on their black paddling

126

shapes as his minisub rose
from the depths.

He saw them exchange hur-
ried hand signals. They began
to swim away, side by side,
their fins fluttering rapidly
now. They were swimming a
definite course, and still there
was no sign of their subma-
rine as his minisub inexorably
gained on them.

Now that he had reached
their altitude, he noticed they
were already tiring. One diver
looked back, then swam fran-
tically to catch up with the
other. Like a slow fighter
plane, the minisub came in on
them from behind, and one
diver pushed at the other.
They again exchanged hand
signals, losing yards to the
minisub, and one began to
swim hard while the other
turned back, facing the mini-
sub, raising his hand in what
appeared to be a courteous
military salute. The minisub
kept coming straight at him.

Then the diver spread his
arms in a gesture of peace.
The minisub’s torpedo-shaped
nose rammed his belly. Un-
sheathing his long blade, the
Murderer struck.

As the diver wriggled, the
Murderer withdrew the blade
and struck again. Air bubbles
streamed from the diver’s
chest with each exhalation of
breath as he backwatered. His
expression seemed mild sur-
prise as the Murderer struck
a third time, driving the blade
down between the man’s neck

HAYDEN HOWARD

and collar bone, pushing him
deeper. The next blow smash-
ed the mask. Belatedly, the
man’s hand flurried, seeming
to clutch at his bubbles as he
sank.

The Murderer looked up.
Far off under the ice, the
other diver had stopped, was
looking down, watching, and
the Murderer held up his
blade as a signal and turned
the minisub upward, after
him. This diver took evasive
action among the downward
bulges of old Siberian ice and
suddenly vanished.

Although there was no sky
glare in the water, the Mur-
derer supposed the diver had
found an open lead in the ice
and would rather freeze to
death, or at least put up a fight
from the edge of the ice, than
die in the water.

VALVING more air into the
minisub’s flotation tanks,
the Murderer steered it rapid-
ly up into the oddly round,
oddly dim lead in the ice pack.
At the edge of his mask-vision
he glimpsed a longish tubular
shape suspended in the water,
but the minisub was rising too
fast for him to get a good look.
The overbuoyant minisub
bloomed above the surface and
sloshed back, rolling unstead-
ily while the film of water slid
off his mask without freezing
and he saw.

The white blur became the
biggest twin-rotored copter he
had ever seen, squatting there

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE

on the ice, white except for its
glass. Then his eyes were at-
tracted by motion, by the
parka-clad men hauling the
surviving diver up on the ice.
Other darkish figures were
simply standing there, some of
them beginning to point.

Behind them was a smaller
helicopter with the loop-shap-
ed aerial of a radio location
finder mounted atop its plastic
dome. There was something
wrong with the sky, and the
Murderer realized it was not
the sky. It was a vast white
canvas dome, dimpling in the
polar wind. The unnatural cir-
cle in the ice and the equip-
ment grouped around it all
were hidden from aerial obser-
vation.

Pointing at him from the
fuselage of the huge helicop-
ter, and so close that his eyes
had avoided it, was a metal
boom with a hoist cable taut
into the water, tethering
something below the surface.
Some of the men were running
toward the huge helicopter
now. In front of them at the
edge of the ice lay shapeless
bundles of what appeared to
be black rubberized canvas,
and he wondered fleetingly if
these contained more of the
soon-to-be gelatinous picket
buoys. One of the figures was
aiming something at him. As
the Murderer let air out of the
flotation tanks and swiftly
sank, he realized it had not
been a gun ; it had been a cam-
era with a telephoto lens.

127

He passed the tubular shape
on the end of the cable. It was
an anti-submarine torpedo.
When he sank deeper, he pass-
ed a cylinder dangling from
two black rubber-insulated
cables.

He valved compressed air
back into the flotation tanks
and came up under the ice, so
hazardously close he had to
duck his head as he steered a
weaving course among the
downward bulges of old Si-
berian ice. Even though he
had been deafened, he felt the
sonar pulsing against the ice,
searching for him. Then he
felt it knocking against the
minisub, pinging against his
air tanks, thudding accusing-
ly against his bones. It follow-
ed him wherever he steered.

He smiled blearily. This
would be the ultimate if they
unleashed the expensively in-
tricate homing torpedo — at
one man riding a cheap mini-
sub constructed by a big-
handed, happily singing petty
officer on his own time. He
hoped they would waste the
torpedo on him. If he had to
be destroyed by a gadget, an
infernal machine, at least it
was better to be killed as an
individual rather than in a
group so large he would be
nameless in death.

Abruptly the sonar left him.
They must have decided he
was not going to lead them
back to his submarine. Now
they were hurriedly ranging
for it.

128

He cruised on and on with
his dead cargo.

Then he felt the echo of
sonar from the submarine’s
hull. He must be close. The
helicopter, with its sonar sys-
tem lowered into the water
like a fisherman’s hook, had
caught the Fleet Ballistic Mis-
sile submarine.

He could feel the subma-
rine’s sonar searching franti-
cally. They would be sounding
for another submarine. He
could imagine horror on the
sonar men’s faces as they real-
ized they couldn’t detect any-
thing at the apparent source
of the unidentified sonar that
had caught them.

The submarine’s sonar
caught something — him.

HE STEERED directly into
it and found the subma-
rine. Bow into the current, the
gray undersea boat was still
holding its position. The Mur-
derer guessed the commander
had decided that the best move
was no move.

Valving out air, he brought
the minisub down, opened the
outer hatch and dragged
the minisub into the water-
filled chamber. A great weari-
ness had come over him and it
was all he could do to lock the
hatch. He knocked on the bulk-
head, while the persistent so-
nar pinging went on and on.
Someone tapped very gently,
although they might as well
hammer with a wrench; it
wouldn’t make any difference

HAYDEN HOWARD

now. The Murderer realized
they were waiting for him to
plug into the telephone socket
and give his maximum depth
and time spent there and other
decompression data he hadn’t
kept. They intended to decom-
press him as if this were just
another safe-and-sane train-
ing exercise.

In the chamber lights, Bar-
ney’s rubber suit had sagged
over the side of the minisub
like a black rag doll. The Mur-
derer averted his eyes and
plugged in.

“One — two — three — ” he

said automatically.

“Barney?”

“Barney’s dead.”

“This is the commander.
There is a submarine out
there. For some reason, we
can’t locate it with our sonar.
Have you seen it?”

“Commander, it’s a helicop-
ter. They have an anti-subma-
rine torpedo in the water.”

“I’m having difficulty read-
ing you — ”

“Helicopter. Anti-sub tor-
pedo!”

“Did they take any aggres-
sive action against you?”
“Depends on how you look
at it. Their picket buoys are
under here. Barney tried to
recover one. It was booby-
trapped to destroy itself.”
“Barney?” the commander’s
voice persisted.

“I told you he’s dead ! I got
one of their divers.”

“One of their divers? He
was attacking you?”

MURDER BENEATH THE POLAR ICE

“I killed him. He was trying
to get away.”

There was a long pause.
Only the persistent knocking
of the giant helicopter’s sonar
reached the Murderer’s ear.

When the commander spoke
again, it was as if murder had
been done. “Do they know?”
“The other one looked back.
Sure they know. They know.”
“Then they may consider
we’re the ones who’ve taken
aggressive action,” the com-
mander said slowly. “We’ll
have to wait. If we move off,
their commanding officers on
the spot may feel committed to
local retaliatory action. We’ll
have to wait while they’re
radioing for instructions.
We’ll have to hope their side
will decide to take this before
an international court.”

“Court ? What sort of court?
A murder court?”

“Let’s hope it’s only one
murder,” the commander’s
voice came through distantly,
“and not one hundred million.
We’ll have to sit it out.”

As decompression began,
the Murderer sank down be-
side Barney’s body in the
water-filled chamber. Super-
imposed upon the command-
er’s two little kids, swinging
on their swings, he saw the
surprised face of the diver —
and even the little fish, lost
from its school, and its won-
drous eye — two billion years
of evolution waiting for a ver-
dict of life or death.

END

129

Looking Ahead?

You must be, or you wouldn’t be reading this maga-
zine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of
technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and
terrestrials and extraterrestrials.

But what about looking ahead to:

• Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF,
the more free issues you get.)

• Saving steps? (A subscription brings IF right to
your mailbox, irrespective of heat, cold, snow, rain,
gloom of night — and mailed flat, to boot.)

• Saving time? (You get your copies at least a week
before the newsstands receive theirs.)

• Saving your temper? (IF can and often does sell
out; with a subscription there's no need to hunt
from stand to stand.)

IN SHORT, IF YOU’RE REALLY LOOKING AHEAD,
YOU’LL EITHER USE THE COUPON BELOW OR SEND
IN YOUR ORDER ON ANY OLD SHEET OF PAPER.

COUPON ———————

IF Science Fiction • 421 Hudson Street • New York 14, New York

Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the

issue. I enclose (check one):

6 issues. . . .$1.75 12 issues. . . .$3.00

Foreign Postage 6 Issues 50* Additional

Name

Address _

City P. O. Zone State

The BEMs in /our neighborhood

won't run off with your books
if you put inside the front cover
of each book... a gummed bookplate
with your name printed on it !

^ / \ oo

oo

o o

O O O O O

o . o oooo

<J 0 OOOO OO 0 (J

YOUR NAME HERE

YOUR NAME HERE

No. GF-614 by Emsh

No. GF-612 by Emsh

FINAGLE SAYS

The umpteenth corollary
of Finagle's General Law of
Dynamic Negatives says:
"No books are ever last
by loaning except ones you
particularly want to keep."

mir 3?amr iSrrr

(SS&ZSZSZS YouN..n.H„.

No. GM-12 by Cullen Rapp No. GX-57 by Lynd Ward

100 for $4; 200, $6; 300, $8
with owner's name imprinted

All Postpaid. Add stale sales tax, if any
ACTUAL SIZE, all designs, 3x4 inches

The designs shown above are the only ones we offer^

Order from IF MAGAZINE 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y.

BESTER'S BEST!

Have you read his famed THE DEMOLISHED MAN ? Lived in
its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dra-
matically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that
society doesn't exist — yet !

By special arrangement with the publisher of THE DEMOLISHED
MAN, we can offer you this magnificent book for $1.00, 2/3 off the
regular price, plus 25^ for postage and handling.

Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately!
(Use Coupon or Separate Sheet)

GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.
Please 421 Hudson St.

rush me New York

□ copies of 14,

THE DEMOLISHED MAN N. Y.

Name

Address

City State.

I Enclose.

THE DEMOLISHED MAN
, The Original
Edition — Complete !
Not A Low Cost Reprint —
Yet Yours For
Only $1.00!
Plus Postage 254